How Industries Are Meeting Consumer Expectations With Speech AI

Thanks to rapid technological advances, consumers have become accustomed to an unprecedented level of convenience and efficiency.

Smartphones make it easier than ever to search for a product and have it delivered right to the front door. Video chat technology lets friends and family on different continents connect with ease. With voice command tools, AI assistants can play songs, initiate phone calls or recommend the best Italian food in a 10-mile radius. AI algorithms can even predict which show users may want to watch next or suggest an article they may want to read before making a purchase.

It's no surprise, then, that customers expect fast and personalized interactions with companies. According to a Salesforce research report, 83% of consumers expect immediate engagement when they contact a company, while 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Nearly 60% of all customers want to avoid customer service altogether, preferring to resolve issues with self-service features.

Meeting such high consumer expectations places a massive burden on companies in every industry, including on their staff and technological needs - but speech AI can help.

Speech AI can understand and converse in natural language, creating opportunities for seamless, multilingual customer interactions while supplementing employee capabilities. It can power self-serve banking in the financial services industry, enable food kiosk avatars in restaurants, transcribe clinical notes in healthcare facilities or streamline bill payments for utility companies - helping businesses across industries deliver personalized customer experiences.

Speech AI for Banking and Payments Most people now use both digital and traditional channels to access banking services, creating a demand for omnichannel, personalized customer support. However, higher demand for support coupled with a high agent churn rate has left many financial institutions struggling to keep up with the service and support needs of their customers.

Common consumer frustrations include difficulty with complex digital processes, a lack of helpful and readily available information, insufficient self-service options, long call wait times and communication difficulties with support agents.

According to a recent NVIDIA survey, the top AI use cases for financial service institutions are natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs). These models automate customer service interactions and process large bodies of unstructured financial data to provide AI-driven insights that support all lines of business across financial institutions - from risk management and fraud detection to algorithmic trading and customer service.

By providing speech-equipped self-service options and supporting customer service agents with AI-powered virtual assistants, banks can improve customer experiences while controlling costs. AI voice assistants can be trained on finance-specific vocabulary and rephrasing techniques to confirm understanding of a user's request before offering answers.

Kore.ai, a conversational AI software company, trained its BankAssist solution on 400-plus retail banking use cases for interactive voice response, web, mobile, SMS and social media channels. Customers can use a voice assistant to transfer funds, pay bills, report lost cards, dispute charges, reset passwords and more.

Kore.ai's agent voice assistant has also helps live agents provide personalized suggestions so they can resolve issues faster. The solution has been shown to improve live agent efficiency by cutting customer handling time by 40% with a return on investment of $2.30 per voice session.

With such trends, expect financial institutions to accelerate the deployment of speech AI to streamline customer support and reduce wait times, offer more self-service options, transcribe calls to speed loan processing and automate compliance, extract insights from spoken content and boost the overall productivity and speed of operations.

Speech AI for Telecommunications Heavy investments in 5G infrastructure and cut-throat competition to monetize and achieve profitable returns on new networks mean that maintaining customer satisfaction and brand loyalty is paramount in the telco industry.

According to an NVIDIA survey of 400-plus industry professionals, the top AI use cases in the telecom industry involve optimizing network operations and improving customer experiences. Seventy-three percent of respondents reported increased revenue from AI.

By using speech AI technologies to power chatbots, call-routing, self-service features and recommender systems, telcos can enhance and personalize customer engagements.

KT, a South Korean mobile operator with over 22 million users, has built GiGa Genie, an intelligent voice assistant that's been trained to understand and use the Korean language using LLMs. It has already conversed with over 8 million users.

By understanding voice commands, the GiGA Genie AI speaker can support people with tasks like turning on smart TVs or lights, sending text messages or providing real-time traffic updates.

KT has also strengthened its AI-powered Customer Contact Center with transformer-based speech AI models that can independently handle over 100,000 calls per day. A generative AI component of the system autonomously responds to customers with suggested resolutions or transfers them to human agents for more nuanced questions and solutions.

Telecommunications companies are expected to lean into speech AI to build more customer self-service capabilities, optimize network performance and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Speech AI for Quick-Service Restaurants The food service industry is expected to reach $997 billion in sales in 2023, and its workforce is projected to grow by 500,000 openings. Meanwhile, elevat

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/09/07/speech-ai-for-industries/...
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