Sendbird will launch SmartAssistant, a ‘first-of-its-kind’, low-code, customisable bot for AI-embedded apps.
The conversational AI solution has been designed for marketing, commerce, and customer service.
Sendbird, which is due to announce the launch later this month, describes itself as a “global in-app conversations API platform”. Founded in 2013, the company currently has over 300 million monthly active users across 4000 apps.
The new solution coincides with the impending launch of Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, for which it has recently published guidance to help companies prepare.
While Copilot offers comprehensive integration into the Microsoft 365 suite, it is limited to the Microsoft ecosystem and requires a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license to use.
SmartAssistant Features
SendBird may well be trying to ride the same wave of demand for AI as Microsoft, but its SmartAssistant bot differentiates itself through its extensive customisation options and deployment flexibility.
Companies can easily add an AI-embedded chat application using Sendbird’s new UIKit app builder.
According to Sendbird, any developer is able to initiate a SmartAssistant proof-of-concept within minutes without any coding required via its dashboard.
The UIKits are available for Android, iOS, React, and React Native making it possible for all developers to embed chats in mobile and web apps.
Sendbird cites further unique attributes of the SmartAssistant as its fluency of Generative Pre-trained Transformers coupled with knowledge and business insights from first-party data, which are connected to the Large Language Model (LLM).
As a result, the AI assistant can offer relevant answers that have been tailored to the exact needs of prospects and customers.
The accuracy of answers is increased by the inclusion of the company’s own content within the LLM and they are presented in such a natural, human-like way that they don’t appear to have even been written by a machine. This makes for much more personal interactions, helping to improve customer experiences.
In March 2023, Sendbird released another useful business feature, ‘Sendbird Notifications’. The solution reportedly reduces SMS expenditure for business users by 50 percent and doubles the conversion rate.
The AI-Assistant Revolution
While AI has steadily been growing in popularity over the years, the global demand for AI solutions has surged this year, in part due to the launch of ChatGPT, which soon after prompted the introduction of Google’s own ‘Bard’, Einstein GPT, Slack GPT, and more.
Despite fears of compliance infringements through using ChatGPT the seed appears to be well and truly planted in the collective business mindset that AI can lighten your employees’ workload, which is not an unattractive possibility given the challenging economic climate that has led to numerous high-profile companies, including Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Meta, making major layoffs.
With everyone scrambling to acquire AI tech, suppliers are working hard on the other side of the fence to meet this new demand.
It is still early days but with new solutions, such as Sendbird’s SmartAssistant, coming thick and fast to the public marketplace, it will undoubtedly become more difficult for both consumers and vendors to differentiate the products.
In the race to establish market dominance, it will also be interesting to see which solution comes out on top.
Usually, the “Big Five” tech corporations tend to cede dominance in certain areas to one another so that they are not competing directly, but that certainly hasn’t happened yet as this space may just be too good to give up.
