Conversational AI Becoming an Integral Part of Messaging Platforms

Messaging platforms have surpassed phone calls and emails as a way to communicate for businesses as well family and friends. The next phase in the evolution of messaging, according to a recent Gartner (News - Alert) report, will be to incorporate cloud-based AI-driven technologies to improve the effectiveness of self-service and customer engagement among those platforms.

Gartner's 2021 Planning Guide for Customer Engagement reveals that more than 2.1 billion people use Facebook (News - Alert), Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger every day. Monthly active users on those platforms are growing rapidly and 2.66 percent of consumers say they want to interact with brands via messaging apps. As a result, apps have been adding new features including built-in natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and payment features.

Organizations that want to capitalize on the power of messaging to better engage and retain their customers need to step up their games with the integration of AI and other automated capabilities. Gartner has outlined four key technologies they expect to make inroads this year as messaging platforms become increasing intelligent and automated.

IBM (News - Alert)'s Watson has been a key player in AI for more than a decade. The question-answering system uses advanced NLP and machine learning to glean information and perform knowledge representation and automated reasoning. It is also used to automate a variety of business functions.

The Yellow Messenger solution acts as a cognitive engagement cloud, providing customer engagement and support, enterprise automation, HR management and other business functions. It integrates with Whatsapp for business, Slack, PowerBI, Alexa and Google (News - Alert) Assistant. The company also launched a chatbot in tandem with the NHA to help distribute information to fight COVID-19.

Intercom's messaging platform enables businesses to better communicate with prospective and existing customers. Features include the ability to track and filter customer data like conversation history, product usage information and payment details. These variables may be used to generate personalized and automated marketing emails as well as in-app messages.

Google's Dialogflow was originally designed as a virtual assistant for smartphones. It is now touted as an advanced development suite for creating conversational AI applications, including chatbots, voicebots and IVR bots. The solution features a visual bot-building platform and collaboration tools, and is designed to scale across the enterprise.

Conversational AI is breaking into the mainstream, and may become commonplace in a variety of popular messaging applications this year. As businesses discover the numerous benefits of incorporating AI into their most used messaging platforms, we can expect to see more automation and a host of new features roll out in the coming months.

Edited by Maurice Nagle