NLP, Text-to-Speech, Voice Recognition: 3 Features That Make Chatbots Very Powerful

Chatbots – the buzzword of 2017, at least in the IT world. They have helped dozens of businesses streamline communication across multiple channels over the past few years. And while we can’t introduce them as something new, we cannot go on about them without saying that they have grown very powerful.

Chatbots are tied to the technologies powering them, such as AI and NLP. Since these technologies are evolving, chatbots evolve alongside them. Let’s see how NLP, Text-to-Speech, and voice recognition help chatbots become more versatile and powerful.

NLP

If anything has changed the way people perceive chatbots than it is definitely NLP or Natural Language Processing. This is one of the fastest emerging technologies in the AI world. Even if you have never had a conversation with a chatbot, you’ve benefited from NLP. Remember all those word suggestions as you type a message on your smartphone? Well, that is NLP.

Bringing chatbots closer to humans was not an easy task. We use so many different words and, quite often, the meaning changes with the context. We keep learning our entire lives how to communicate with and understand other people. Chatbots had to be helped so that they can understand, derive meaning, remember, and learn. Enter the NLP.

Today, a chatbot with the best AI is capable of holding human-like conversations and even sound smart. And it is quite interesting how a chatbot achieves it with the help of NLP. Once a chatbot receives a message, it distinguishes entities from intent. Entity refers to any object that can be named, while the intent is the purpose of the statement.

But there is one more thing that makes NLP unlock the true potential of chatbots – machine learning. Thanks to machine learning, chatbots can learn from past conversations and their mistakes, improve and adapt. This happens without the user interfering.

Text-to-Speech

Speech synthesis is very old stuff, perhaps as old as computers. Today text-to-speech, or simply TTS, are the terms you’ll see more often. Over the years, the processing power of processors has improved so much that today even smartphone users can benefit from TTS.

In layman’s terms, TTS gives a voice to a chatbot. And when you give something a voice, you make it appear more human, you give it a personality. This is exactly what made chatbots more powerful in the eyes of brands.

By precisely choosing the vocabulary of a chatbot and fine-tuning its manner of speech, companies can create chatbots that reflect their branding strategy. Once set up, a chatbot will consistently use the same tone to convey the exact same emotion and message to the customers.

Regardless of whether you want to make your chatbot sound reliable or wise or casual and energetic, you can do it. This functionality helps companies deliver a better conversational experience to the customers. People can access and engage a chatbot so much easier, and the entire experience becomes more human-like, engaging, and entertaining.

Furthermore, TTS gives more options to end-users. It allows them to decide whether they want to read chatbot messages or listen to them. Because of all this, TTS is another feature that makes chatbots so powerful.

Voice Recognition

We’ve got a question for you. Do you think that Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri or Cortana would end up famous if they required a user to input text to communicate with them? We thought so. No, they wouldn’t. The ability to activate a chatbot and communicate it hands-free is very inviting, even for the users who don't have any interest in trying out new tech.

This is simply because voice recognition technology makes using chatbots even more convenient. And if we are being honest, we live in a world where hands-free interaction became a necessity. With less time on our hands and a tightly packed schedule, an option to schedule a meeting, make reservations, call a taxi, or order food with our hands on the wheel is a dream come true.

Furthermore, a chatbot that supports voice recognition and activation can be extremely useful when users have to find information quickly. Especially for the users with disabilities.

Powered by NLP, the voice recognition chatbots can also learn more by communicating with the users. Which makes them more powerful, both in terms of use cases and ease of accessibility.