A major percent of internet advertising revenues are shared by Facebook and Google. Facebook makes it advertising money using re-targeting, and latent targeting on user profiles. Google uses an auction model built on search queries to fill its coffers. Search query is one of the top most actionable intents from the user on internet. Google has built an amazing business around it.

Facebook has got more or less monopoly around social communication. Social tweets and messages don’t have a merchandising intent, similar to search queries. Facebook has trickily used the re-targeting mechanism (Disclaimer: I patented the idea, before anyone has implemented it) to make the ads more actionable.

We will eventually be at a stage, where Facebook and Google will be fighting for the same ad dollars. Who has got a strategic advantage to win the war? In my view it will be Facebook.

Elaborating more, Facebook controls the user’s interests and influences across its social properties. Facebook can use the personal data from the users to predict search queries and information that the user will “Google” in the near future and make it as part of the user stream. You might ask, is it possible?

How can Facebook predict search queries before they happen? Facebook has got a search engine on its page and has got a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing. They have access to both what the user is doing at any given point of time, what their influences are and what their search queries will be through its popular properties and partners. They also have significant information on a user through their re-targeting program, about their activities outside of the social walls.

Using above data, one can use variations of Sequence to Sequence algorithms to give search queries. The input sequence can be the aggregated behavior. We can use social profile embeddings, image embeddings in the social stream, previous search queries, the location information as inputs for the Sequence to Sequence algorithm. We can us a Variational encoder for representing the input data. The output sequence can be a list of search queries that the user will type on Google. One can also pose the query prediction as a recommendation problem. We can train a wide and deep neural net on the user’s data and search queries to predict search queries. We can also borrow techniques from Zero Query search engine techniques to do the predictions and generate information in Social Streams, so that users don’t have to go to Google to get information.

It would be a great win for users and Facebook, if they can stop the interruption on social browsing by 50%. Facebook can make money by asking the advertisers to bid on predicted search queries. It might be an easy sell, to the advertisers, with their relationships and engagement numbers.

If I were Google, I would be really scared of this possibility and eventuality (Most probably in the next two years). I would break the Facebook’s monopoly on communication as early as possible.

Disclaimer: My friends at Facebook and other social networks, if you decide to implement this idea, I would appreciate, if you can pay me royalty for the patent I filed with title “Advanced techniques to improve content presentation experiences for Businesses and Users”. Please don’t ignore legal notices from a poor innovator :).

Visit us at www.voicy.ai for more information.

Were you amused by demo of Google Assistant calling a business? The demo fused the elements from Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation and Text to Speech and was nicely presented by Google’s team.

We at Voicy.AI has been perfecting Google Duplex like technology for businesses from 2015 building upon our customer engagement patents from 2010. Specifically, our patent with title “Systems and methods for virtual agents to help customers and businesses” talks about several ideas that were shown in Google’s demo. We also talk about several next generation customer engagement solutions and conversational commerce ideas in the patent. It is a great sense of personal satisfaction and pride to know that our team has recognized the opportunity before the industry leaders and great teams at Google, Facebook and Amazon.

In addition to patents, we also pioneered one click virtual assistants for businesses on Telephone using our technology. We converted a complex implementation consisting of Telephony platform, Speech to Text, Dialog Engine technology and custom implementation typically costing millions of dollars from bigger companies to a simple one click SAS solution.

You can subscribe to our AI Telephone assistant solution and reduce your customer services costs from thousands to hundreds of dollars and provide 24/7 service to your customers. You not only get our technology, but also get coverage from our patents. Please reach out to info@voicy.ai, to see how we can help your business.

You have a flight to catch at the LAX in another one hour. You are on your way to the airport and you are running late as usual. You don’t know which parking lot you need to enter to be closest to your terminal. You take your mobile phone and ask a question “ which parking lot is closer to terminal 3 ? ” and a voice responded saying “ parking lot 4 is the closest to terminal 3 and it is 65% full at the moment”. You also get a pop up in your mobile which says “Directions to parking lot 3 at the LAX”. That voice you heard was not a customer service agent from the airport but your very own personal assistant for the airport. To be more specific it is an in app voice assistant of the airport provided to help its travelers.

An in app voice assistant is a software that can perform tasks or services for an individual. Voice assistant apps can simulate a discussion with the user to deliver voice or text-based engagement on any web application / mobile interface. These voice activated assistants are sometimes called chat-bots because their goal is to quicken the actions you already take on your smartphone or other digital devices.

“ Voice activated assistant is a natural dialog platform that automates natural language conversations and, in turn, cut down on the cost of customer engagement and represents a more efficient business solution ” explains Jagadish Nomula, CTO, Voicy.AI.

An in app voice assistant for an airport can make the travel process much easier by helping the travelers with tasks like getting information on the flight, getting directions to a terminal, helping you to connect to the internet, information on boarding and departure timings, luggage limits, finding a restaurant in the airport, even placing an order from the restaurant and much more. They can give you information on pretty much every question that you have while passing through the airport.

Some travel and flight voice assistant, can also inform you about the available flights, the offers and promotions given by the different airlines, details about the hotels that are available in that particular place, and even the climate of your intended destination. All that information is configured to enhance the customers experience through the app and they are becoming more and more efficient in providing you with the right response by observing the way  you interact with your gadget.

Ever since their genesis, in-app voice assistant have been used to resolve the queries of its user, but if configured differently they can also be used to promote offers and market for businesses. An example for this is the banking in-app voice assistant. This kind of a voice assistant can help you with a variety of customer service tasks like letting you access your account, notifying your account balance & routing numbers, letting you make payments, transferring funds, finding the nearest ATM, etc while also providing you information about the upcoming events & promotions offered by the bank.

Experts say that the trend of voice assistants is going to be undeniable in the near future.  It is predicted that by the end of 2018 almost all the mobile app providers are going to provide a voice option along with other SMS, email and push notifications.

Technology is growing and the market today is offering different in-app voice assistants. Some provide you information while some offer you a solution. Either ways they make accomplishing our day to day tasks simpler. Carry out a research and find out a voice assistant that best suits your needs and preferences or ping us at info@voicy.AI  and we will be more than glad to assist you with a free review of the scope of work.

Visit us at http://voicy.ai/ for more information.  

“These days no one can make money on the goddamn airline business. The economics represent sheer hell.” – C. R. Smith, American Airlines
The ex-CEO’s quote from the 1970’s is still applicable to the airline industry of today. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) the global Airline industry has doubled its revenues from US$369 billion in 2004 to a projected $746 billion in 2014 but making stable and consistent profits still remains elusive. Increase in competitiveness, customer expectations, fuel expenses, low cost carriers, labour unrest are some of the major issues challenging the airline industry . For example fuel accounts for almost 20% of a carrier’s cost structure and the fuel prices are expected to increase to $64.9/barrel ( which is a 25% increase compared to the current cost/barrel) over the next year, which is significantly going to affect the profits made by the airline industry. Correspondingly, with the constant fluctuations in the traditional passenger traffic, airlines will be scrambling to fill the unused capacity – a variable that drastically increases the operating costs per trip. It is no wonder that when thrown in an omni-present hyper-competitive environment that constantly drives price wars, the executives always look for ways to reduce costs and drive additional revenues. This is exactly what is happening with the Airline industry.

“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” – Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks

Out of all the ways that can help improve revenue, Customer service could be the one touch-point of airline operations to improve their revenues. There is enough proof that customers are willing to pay the extra penny for a good service. Be it targeted marketing, new reservations or post-reservation services; customer experience is the next battleground for the airlines looking to differentiate themselves.

A detailed primary research (lots of reading and talking to other airline travelers), it was established that 73% of airline travelers agree that the customer service experience with most of the airlines is dissatisfactory and time-consuming. Increase in the no.of air travelers, insufficient customer service personnel, language barriers have also been contributing significantly to this attitude in the customers of the airline industry. This shows that, despite their continued efforts of making labor-intensive customer service investments, the airlines are unable to produce the results needed to improve their ROI.

Voicy from Voicemonk brings you an AI-enabled virtual agent that can be your customer engagement personnel letting you to completely automate the process of customer service to all your customers. Being a natural dialogue platform, Voicy enables your customers to converse with it, while retaining the context of earlier conversations ensuring customer satisfaction.

But how does this benefit airlines in terms of numbers?

The airline industry has an average passenger load factor of 80%. An AI-enabled chatbot solution with awareness of passenger context through multiple channels (Facebook, Slack, Telephone or SMS) can facilitate conversational commerce translating into just-in-time bookings. We anticipate this improves utilization upto 84% resulting in an additional $0.72 profits per passenger, representing a 16% increase from the current industry average.

Approximately 5% of airline revenue is spent on customer servicing costs. On an annual basis, that is approximately $30 per passenger. Trials with Voicy for Airline indicate that this service cost can potentially fall to $24 per passenger, resulting in $120M savings annually, a non-trivial amount in an industry with only 4.1% net profit margin.

A recent study by SH&E, a leading aviation consultancy estimated that as a percentage of revenues, the latter activities’ share ranges from >10% for a carriers such as British Airways to ~3% for LCC’s such as Ryan Air. This means it costs most carriers approximately $30 to acquire and book new customers as opposed to $10 for LCC’s. Voicy.AI with its contextual/historical awareness and tight integration with backend ecommerce, payment, CRM, marketing platform could enable most carriers to reduce this cost to approximately $26/passenger over 2 years.
Wish to see a demo of our agent live in action?

Check this out: https://rebrand.ly/vmairline

In the service and hospitality industries one thing that’s keeping small business owners awake at night is customer experience (CX).

CX is critical because it holds the key to a customer’s willingness to spend money with you now and in the future. According to a Walker study, by 2020, customer experience will be the most important thing that differentiates your brand, outgunning both price and product.

And a customer’s experience with your brand starts way before they hand over payment for a take-out or receive a beauty treatment. It starts with the impression they get from trying to make a booking via an app or your website, or the ease with which they get information when calling your store, or how quickly they get a response to an enquiry.

Customers are becoming ever more demanding. They expect the same – if not better – experience from a small business as they would from a well-resourced multinational. But they want it ‘their way’; mobile app consumption has hit a plateau as customers adopt chat as their new browser. By 2019, requests for customer support through mobile messaging apps will exceed requests coming through traditional social media. And data shows that by 2018, “buy” buttons will contribute 2% of brands’ digital sales. This may sound like a small amount, but it represents billions of dollars worth of business.

And that’s the conundrum: for a small business, providing an amazing omni-channel experience for customers could be a differentiator for your brand but getting it right could take time and money. You might need to invest more in your digital channels to respond quickly to customer requests. And what small business owner can afford to do that if it risks taking resources away from delivering a service to customers?

Here’s where technology can play a part. Small service-driven businesses like restaurants, take-away outlets or beauty salons could benefit hugely from the development of artificial intelligence.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by that and how it might work:

Imagine you own a beauty clinic in Texas with an ambition to grow. But investing in digital capabilities, promotions and hiring people to handle bookings and customer enquiries is expensive. If people are not dedicated to these tasks, you’ll miss out on bookings altogether.

So what if you implemented an artificial intelligence agent to take bookings and handle customer responses to specific promotions?

This may sound like science fiction, but it’s a scenario that we’re making real with Voicy.ai today.

That Texan beauty clinic I was talking about is actually one of our clients. We implemented an SMS promotion which went out to 7000 customers on their database, offering them a reduced-rate beauty treatment. An automated ‘bot’ or virtual agent handled customer responses and we programmed it to answer the top 20 expected questions either on the phone or via digital channels like Facebook Messenger. Because the technology is integrated with the customer’s booking and point of sale system, the virtual agent can automatically take appointment requests and book them in. And working with the client, we’re able to continually grow the intelligence of the service by adding answers to new questions we hear from customers. This means the system gets even smarter over time, so the amount of merchant-to-customer interaction required continually decreases.

So by implementing a virtual agent, this business has been able to focus resources on the customer experience in their clinic. They’ve also implemented manageable promotions to drive repeat business at a higher margin than previous promotions have delivered, in a way that allows them to comfortably manage the ebbs and flows of demand. And this is critical because repeat business, referrals and recommendations deliver more profitable, long term value than something like a Groupon promotion could ever achieve.

AI agents cost less to implement than people and of course this raises a few questions. Firstly, some clients fear that customers may not like dealing with a bot and would prefer to speak to a real person when making a booking. Whilst that could be true in some demographics, it’s definitely changing as customers get used to using automated services even in mission critical activities like personal banking. Gartner predicts that by 2020 customers will experience 85% of all service interactions without communicating with a person because bots can help you 24/7.

Secondly people fear that AI will take jobs away. Gartner research states that by 2025, up to one third of all jobs could be replaced by smart machines. But whilst AI will reduce the number of repetitive tasks done by people, it will enable business growth and investment into other roles. AI has the power to democratize customer experience, so that even SMBs can afford dedicated support which pays for itself by delivering business growth.

The benefits to customers are clear: using Voicy.ai, SMB customers are increasing their revenues by at least 15%, whilst also reducing customer engagement costs by up to 70% and improving overall customer satisfaction. Those are huge wins. And in the case of our client in Texas, this means they can invest in additional beauty technicians to handle their business growth.

Getting CX right is critical, and mobile is becoming the most important part of an omni-channel strategy. Customers expect to be able to search for information, receive promotions, chat with agents and make bookings, all from their smart phones. Our voicy.ai platform provides multi-channel customer engagement over phone, SMS, messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, and multi-modal apps that enable voice and text interactions.

In Summary:

It will soon be commonplace for businesses of all sizes to use friendly robots equipped with natural language processing to interact with customers in a way that’s efficient and easy. There are huge benefits to be had by small businesses embracing what AI can offer today with a service like Voicy.ai:

• It can grow your revenues by 15%+
• It can reduce your customer engagement costs by up to 70%, making you more competitive
• It can improve your overall customer experience and satisfaction rates, driving up loyalty and repeat business
• It can increase response rates to promotions
• It can reduce your customer churn and telephone abandon rates

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to implement AI today.

In a fast paced world as ours, customers are proving to be increasingly demanding. The need for speed has become a basic expectation — Faster Internet, Faster Food Delivery, Faster Time-to-market and Faster Help. A failure in meeting the customer’s needs can bring down even a mammoth like business to the brink of extinction. Especially, in the area of customer service, many companies are losing even their most loyal customers due to their snail paced approach. With customer representatives lacking a deep understanding of product/ service and the context, the customers end up getting frustrated. The first test for their patience is to hear the IVR options carefully, lest they get directed to the wrong department. Then comes the ultimate challenge of getting connected to someone who puts you on hold for an eternity and at the end, rewards your patience with a ticket number for future help.

After a thorough research on call center woes, VoiceMonk came up with a Natural Dialog platform that can automate customer conversations across various communication channels like Telephone, SMS, FaceBook Messenger, Slack etc. VoiceMonk’s Virtual Agents or “Bots” can assist your customers in finding the right solutions to their questions. It can drastically cut down your expenses and efforts in maintaining a full-fledged customer servicing team.

One of our prospective customers, a cloud-based CCI provider enables 24X7 call center support to any business. It provides a virtual receptionist that can direct a customer to the concerned department. The biggest challenge our customer faced was with providing the right technical assistance to its customers. It has a support page on the website, which is a plethora of question and answers. For customers who wanted quick help without having to the flip the pages, it was a daunting task. However, VoiceMonk makes it really simple. Customers could directly chat with a Virtual Agent and ask their questions in a natural language. The agent instantly replies them with relevant answers, providing relief to both customers and companies.

How Exactly Does VoiceMonk answer your questions?

When a customer asks the agent to help him with a question, the agent’s action begins. Let’s say a customer asked the agent a question- “I would like to know what are the features of the product A?” The agent starts making a search from various knowledge bases like ZenDesk, SalesForce Desk etc. All the question and answers are converted into natural conversations. Elaborate answers are broken down into simple steps and pre-requisites. The customer can choose to continue the answer by clicking a button or can skip a step. Multiple questions can be asked until the customer is satisfied with the response. However, a bot has its own limitations. If it fails to handle a query, it backs out and redirects to a human representative.

Just imagine the volume of customer queries that can be handled by our bot and the improvement in customer satisfaction. With the most difficult job done, it’s time to focus on the most important area — your business!

Wish to see a demo of our agent live in action?

Check this out — http://rebrand.ly/vmfaq

Please see a demo our virtual agent for customer engagement (marketing, transacting and customer service) on Facebook Messenger (We also support SMS and Telephone communication channels) for offline commerce in action at http://rebrand.ly/vmconvcom

Using our platform, businesses can not only send marketing messages on SMS but also accept orders from customers.

Please let us know, if you need help engaging your customers on Facebook Messenger/Slack for your businesses.

What is the right user interface for a commerce transaction?

On one side when you walk to a physical store in countries such as India, a personal shopper greets you, asks you what you are looking for, shows you items, gets your feedback from your facial, speech reactions and comes up with more items. Your personal shopper will make sure you complete the transaction by engaging you in an active conversation. Let us call this experience conversational experience.

On the other side we have sites such as Amazon, eBay (Disclosure: I worked at eBay and Amazon. They are great companies with really smart people. I have learnt a lot from everyone I worked with.), which have rich information about the inventory. To purchase an item, you first figure out a search term, look at the search results, refine your search query, look at more items, select an item, read the description, browse more merchandizing and then finally purchase an item. The onus is on the customer to figure out that special merchandize he would love from millions of items. Let us call this experience the status quo.

The status quo experience was invented in 1990’s, when the internet browser was the biggest distribution vehicle and the pioneers in the space had to figure out a way to constrain their ideas into what was possible in HTML. This experience worked for 25 years and made the ecommerce possible.

Can we simplify a transaction and make it easy for the shopper? Has the technology improved to revisit the experience of the status quo? My answer is yes. With the advancements in Deep Learning, Speech recognition and growth of Mobile commerce, Messaging Apps, I feel that it is the time to move from the status quo to the conversational experience.

In the next sequence of posts, I will write articles about the technologies involved for helping businesses with the transition.