The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and our continued adventure into the digital world have paved the way for a new range of machine/human experiences. For years, we’ve been honing the way that people can communicate with machines. Now, we’re entering an age where it’s becoming more possible to chat with bots and machines, just like we would talk to a friend.
Conversational interfaces bridge the gap between our everyday human conversations and the connections that we build with bots and machines in the consumer and professional space. Through the use of unique interfaces, conversational UI makes discussions with machines more natural.
Instead of searching through a structured environment for information, or sending specific “trigger” requests to agents, conversational interfaces allow us to just speak to the software and ask for what we need.
Defining Conversational Interfaces Today
Conversational interfaces allow us to unlock more flexible and relaxed approaches to interacting with the tools that we use every day. Using machine learning and natural language processing, these tools can understand how human beings talk and message, which paves the way for a new kind of discussion.
Your conversational interface can be voice-controlled, like Alexa or Siri, or it can respond to text. To work, most solutions need the following features:
- Text to speech, or speech to text output components
- Natural language understanding and processing
- Image recognition for images and video
- Natural language generation (to respond to us)
The most common kinds of conversational interfaces we’re aware of today are chatbots, and AI-driven bots. Chatbots are visual interfaces available on mobile and desktop apps, which interact with people through text. AI-driven chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning to understand human requests. There are also rules-based bots that respond specifically to certain triggers.
