Are you looking for a conversational AI platform but lost in the crowd? Can’t find the perfect conversational AI for your customer support teams? Your customers or for your sales teams?
The internet is full of “conversational AI” tools that can help you create great customer experiences with just a “little” investment. But today, we’re giving you a solid framework to judge the conversational AI platforms and find the best platform that fits your needs!
Before we dive into the details of conversational AI platform selection, let’s understand what conversational AI platform is.
Conversational AI platform provides a platform to implement human-like dialogue using virtual assistants, chatbots, voice assistants or virtual agents. Conversational AI platforms enable your organizations to build intelligent AI agents that can interact with your customers or employees effortlessly and help them complete their tasks. With conversational AI platforms, you can create:
And more.
When strategically deployed across the customer lifecycle, it unlocks transformative business outcomes – creating unparalleled experiences, optimizing operations, amplifying revenue streams, and unlocking a goldmine of actionable experience data.
Let’s look at how conversational AI works along with it’s components.
The image lists four basic components of the conversational AI platform or tools. Most leading conversational AI platforms employ an almost same stack synergistically orchestrating technologies:
Let's deconstruct this multi-layered architecture:
User Input Processing The first stage involves converting user inputs across channels like text, voice, or visuals into machine-readable data formats. Sophisticated ASR models translate spoken utterances into text, while optical character recognition extracts text from images and documents.
Natural Language Understanding Once inputs are transcribed, natural language processing engines decode their semantics – mapping words and phrases to semantic representations of intent, entities, and context. This grasp of user intent and associated attributes is critical for determining the appropriate conversational path.
Contextual Dialog Management Building on this layer of semantic understanding, a dialog manager maintains conversation state, guides users through relevant dialog flows, accesses knowledge sources, and determines appropriate system responses based on intent classification and predictive intelligence models. This contextual awareness ensures coherent conversations that deftly handle multi-turn queries, apply business logic, triage intentions to human assistance when needed.
Response Generation Finally, naturalistic language must be generated and delivered to the user through their preferred channel. Modern conversational AI platforms employ neural response generators to dynamically create human-like replies rather than relying on rigid pre-defined templates.
Of course, there are nuances in how different conversational AI vendors package and deploy the above AI stack. But this high-level overview demystifies the core workflow, laying the foundation for the conversational AI revolution impacting customer engagement across industries.
The conversational AI market is projected to reach $32 billion by 2025. With such explosive growth, conversational AI vendors are racing to deliver ever-more sophisticated solutions. But the overwhelming number of options for every single use case is a boon as well as curse for enterprises seeking to assess the most appropriate platform. So, we’ve developed a very strict and comprehensive questionnaire to find your next conversational AI software.
Parameter 1: Artificial Intelligence Prowess of the team
When you’re working with a conversational AI platform, you’re working very closely with their team. It is imperative that you confirm the credentials of the team and ensure you’re not buying into an AI wrapper but a platform that is built on strong foundations. Because most often than not, you’ll need the platform to help you drive your KPIs. Having a strong team of AI experts working along with your team can help you all the time.
Parameter 2: Artificial Intelligence capabilities of platform
Check for features like:
Natural Language Proficiency:
Contextual Understanding:
Generative AI Capabilities:
Industry & Domain Awareness:
Composable AI Proficiency: Leading platforms employ modular and composable AI architectures, allowing enterprises to orchestrate complementary models for tone analysis, and other intelligent services tailored to unique use cases.
Parameter 3: Security
Amid rising scrutiny around AI bias and leaks of PII, it is important to check platform’s security. Conversational AI platforms must offer complete transparency into their underlying AI models, datasets, and decision-making processes. Probe vendors on their ethical AI safeguards:
Parameter 3: Platform Useability
You need to make sure that the conversational AI platform you choose is easy to use for everyone in your team. Prioritize platforms empowering key stakeholders like:
Parameter 4: Conversational responses
The conversational AI platform needs to converse naturally with any stakeholders involved. Check for the following:
Parameter 5: Scalability and Integrations
While pilot projects and proof-of-concepts are invaluable starting points, truly future-proof conversational AI platforms must scale seamlessly to support enterprise-wide deployments and evolving use cases:
Parameter 5: Real world performance
Robust enterprise readiness extends beyond just technical checklists. Enterprises must validate real-world performance, time-to-value, and the vendor's ability to be a strategic business partner via:
Proven Expertise:
Performance Benchmarks:
Support Quality:
Alltius is a leading conversational AI platform that is built on decades of research in CMU and Wharton. Alltius transforms customer service by enabling organizations to create AI assistants for their customers and customer support team. Alltius’ self-serve AI assistants can solve customer queries within 10 seconds with almost 0 hallucinations.
Alltius is a no-code, completely customizable and can be deployed within a day. It reduces wait times, deflects tickets, solves customer queries, provides customer insights to product teams and improves cross-sell & upsell revenues from customer support channels.
Best Features
Versatility
Alltius’ AI offers a lot of versatility in options to create AI assistants. Alltius’ no-code platform offers lego like structure where you can pick and choose any of these options to create your AI assistants:
Time to Value
Alltius delivers ROI within weeks with ability to
And more.
Conversation Accuracy
Alltius has inbuilt mechanisms to reduce hallucinations and improve the intent mapping. Alltius’ AI assistants are hallucination free with our advanced segmentation and knowledge technologies. This makes it easy to deploy it on customer facing channels.
Alltius’ AI assistants currently demonstrate 95% precision out-of-the-box and can be pushed up to 99.99% accuracy and precision with additional customization by our team.
Apart from this, Alltius is trained to understand customer intent with highest accuracy, which it then uses to draft responses in order to placate customers according to the mode. The Alltius’ AI assistants require no “prompt engineering” to get correct response, which makes it easy to use.
Customization
Alltius is a completely customizable platform to suit your needs. Alltius is currently used by customers for sales, customer support and customer self support use cases in a variety of industries like insurance, banking, retail, education, consulting and more. Alltius is completely customizable according to your use case.
Conversation Analytics
Alltius doesn't just reply, but is on top of all the conversations happening via the AI assistant platforms. Alltius’ AI assistants learn from conversations, it transforms conversations into knowledge articles for further use and it also shares insights about customer sentiments & trends to the product team to further improve the product.
Such analytics lead to direct impact on customer satisfaction, revenue, loyalty and ultimately, customer experience. Learn more about Alltius:
Dialog Flow is a conversational AI platform by Google that allows building voice and text-based conversational interfaces powered by machine learning and natural language processing.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Free tier with limited usage, paid pricing based on usage starting at $0.002 per request
IBM Watson Assistant leverages conversational AI and natural language processing to automate conversations across any application, device or channel.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Lite plan free, plus pay-as-you-go based on usage starting at $0.0025 per message
Amazon Lex is a fully managed AI service that allows building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Pay-per-use model, voice $0.00075 per speech request, text $0.00004 per request
Microsoft Bot Framework provides a conversational AI platform to build and deploy conversational AI bots across channels like Teams, Slack, Alexa etc.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Paid tier starts at $0.60 per 1,000 messages + data transfer and compute costs
Pandorabots is a conversational AI platform to build and deploy intelligent conversational assistants and chatbots.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Free starter tier, paid business tier at $0.003 per interaction, enterprise pricing available
Kore.ai is a conversational AI platform providing virtual assistants for enterprise employee & customer experience.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Not publicly disclosed, quote-based enterprise pricing
Rulai specializes in conversational AI solutions using its proprietary low-code platform and NLP / NLU engine.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Not publicly disclosed, enterprise pricing model
SAP provides conversational AI services enabling intelligent chatbots and voice assistants for business applications.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: Based on SAP pricing policies & existing product usage
Haptik is a conversational AI platform focused on building virtual assistants and chatbots for customer service.It offers user-friendly visual tools for designing chatbot conversations and pre-built templates for common industry use cases. Haptik combines natural language processing and intent recognition capabilities to facilitate intelligent self-service experiences.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Pricing: $200/month basic plan, enterprise pricing available on request
In conclusion, selecting the right conversational AI platform is pivotal for organizations looking to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive revenue growth. The framework provided offers a comprehensive approach to evaluate and compare different platforms based on key parameters such as AI capabilities, security, usability, conversational responses, scalability, real-world performance, and more. Among the top 10 conversational AI platforms in 2024, each offers unique strengths and weaknesses, catering to various business needs and use cases. Platforms like Alltius stand out for their versatility, rapid time-to-value, high conversation accuracy, customization options, and robust conversation analytics.
However, it's essential for organizations to carefully assess their specific requirements, industry nuances, and desired outcomes before making a decision. Whether it's prioritizing ease of use for non-technical stakeholders, ensuring compliance with security regulations, or seeking scalability for enterprise-wide deployments, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives is paramount.
Ultimately, successful adoption and deployment of conversational AI platforms rely not only on technical functionalities but also on vendor support, real-world performance benchmarks, and strategic partnerships. By leveraging the outlined framework and thoroughly evaluating each platform against their unique business needs, organizations can make informed decisions to unlock the full potential of conversational AI technology and drive transformative business outcomes.