What Are AI Voice Chatbots?

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Voice AI technologies today are revolutionizing various business niches, especially customer support, like never before.
Imagine this. You call a company to learn more about them and their products. The most likely scenario is that you'll be greeted by an AI voice that responds to your voice inputs in spoken language.
Such AI voice chatbots or voice-enabled chatbots have emerged as one of the more advantageous AI business applications. They allow users to achieve simple tasks using hands-free, voice-activated commands and empower customers to navigate through simple queries.
If you want to integrate AI voice chatbots that respond to simple voice commands and help with customer interactions, read this blog to explore how AI voice chatbots work and the various applications of AI-powered voice bots.
What is an AI Voice Chatbot?
AI voice chatbots are software or programs that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing to simulate natural, human-like conversations.
Technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech synthesis, voice recognition, and machine learning empower voice bots to understand human speech and respond with relevant responses to answer queries.
Voice-based chatbots differ from voice assistants as they are used on websites and customer calls to provide instant support based on user input. They reduce the need for human intervention on frequent queries and help automate routine tasks.
Voice AI bots are continuously evolving, becoming more human-like in their customer interactions by learning human languages and expressions from an extensive collection of datasets. Let’s understand which technologies make this possible.
What Are the Key Technologies Behind AI Voice Chatbots?
An AI voice bot is a complex combination of various conversational AI technologies that work in tandem to deliver relevant query responses in a human-like speech:
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
This technology empowers voice bots to understand human speech context and nuances, enabling them to respond rapidly to complex human language.
Natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) are subsets of natural language processing. NLU helps a voice chatbot understand human language, and NLG helps it generate natural-sounding responses.
Speech Recognition
Using speech recognition, voice bots process audio signals captured through the microphone and then extract phonemes from the audio. This voice technology converts these phonemes into words and applies linguistic rules to predict words and sentences.
Text to Speech
Also known as speech synthesis, this enables voice bots to use the decoded text (from speech recognition) to generate human-like speech to respond to user queries.
4. Machine Learning
Machine learning improves the accuracy of voice AI bots. ML helps identify customer preference patterns and provides valuable insights from the voice input. Understanding the context of a query is crucial for conversational AI voice chatbots.
What Are the Applications of AI Voice Chatbots in Various Industries?
Voice AI chatbots are generally used in place of human agents to provide real-time communication and customer support. Websites, financial institutions, and other organizations have used conversational AI voice bot systems for customer support and user feedback.
Let's take a look at some of the applications of voice AI bots and how they make your life easier with pre-built solutions:
Customer Support
Using machine learning and NLP, AI voice bots provide nearly human-like customer support through seamless integration with IVR menus or on-phone assistance.
The support is contextual, with mostly accurate responses. Also, unlike human agents, AI customer support is available around the clock. Some customers prefer such self-service options instead of interacting with a human agent.
As a result, you have hands-free control that leads to happier customers because your voice AI bots can handle complex conversations.
Virtual Assistants
An important part of customer support is providing online assistance to users who want to use certain services or explore the services on your website.
Your integrated AI voice chatbot can provide this personalized assistance.
Healthcare
Doctors use voice-activated assistants to pull patient records and treatment histories for hands-free consultation. Voice bots can also be programmed in health monitoring to alert medical teams whenever a patient's vitals drop.
Patients can even use voice bots on hospital websites to get personalized responses to their issues.
eCommerce
If your eCommerce website is integrated with a conversational AI platform, online shoppers can navigate the site by interacting with the AI voice bot to find what they want. NLP helps this voice chatbot assist customers with online browsing by generating conversational, localized responses.
What Are some Popular AI Voice Chatbots?
Some of the most well-known AI voice chatbots are:
Amazon Alexa
Alexa is one of the leading home-based virtual assistants that helps people with their daily tasks and chores. By connecting it with smart home devices, you can use Alexa to play music, take notes, make lists and purchases on Amazon, and much more.
Google Assistant Voice Chatbot
This AI voice chatbot is available on all devices that have Google on them. It can accomplish many tasks, such as using AI to search for objects on the screen, navigate the city, answer questions, and more.
IBM watsonx Assistant for Voice
This AI voice chatbot is ideal for large organizations with sensitive information that require scalability and security in their call centers. Enterprises can use its predictive and machine learning capabilities to inform their daily decision-making.
The tool also has self-service options for various channels and messaging apps.
Apple Siri
Siri is an Apple-exclusive AI voice bot that can answer questions, translate phrases, control apps on the device, get updates and information, provide travel directions, and much more.
What Are the Key Features of AI Voice Chatbots?
To develop and implement effective AI voice chatbots that benefit your enterprise and improve customer satisfaction, pay attention to the following features:

Effective Communication
Power voice bots to have real-time conversations via smart speakers and are instantly available for query resolution. NLP and quick text to speech features help incorporate practical communication attributes into voice bots.
Voice Recognition
This feature enables a voice bot to differentiate between different voices, accents, and languages, allowing you to set up user authentication layers to secure apps or systems. You can also use this feature to personalize user experiences by recognizing customers through their voice.
Multilingual Support
For businesses operating in different languages, a polyglot voice bot can help enhance customer engagement in their preferred languages.
For example, outbound and inbound calls can be made in the customer's preferred language.
Contextual Understanding
Machine learning and NLP empower voice bots to establish a conversation history with the user, helping them deliver a contextual conversation for better customer experiences.
What Are the AI Voice Chatbot Benefits?
In addition to reducing the workload on live agents, AI voice chatbots deliver several other benefits to businesses:
24/7 Availability
Users have access to nonstop service around the clock. A voice chatbot can support customer engagement until a human can be brought into the loop for complex queries.
Automation Through Voice Commands
A voice chatbot uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to identify different users. You can automate data governance and access using voice AI commands or repetitive tasks around work, like data entry, using voice commands.
Scalability
A voice chatbot can handle heavy workloads during peak periods in your business. Additionally, you can run many tasks through your AI voice bot because their computing ability allows them to perform consistently.
Improved User Experience
Using multilingual AI voice bots capable of contextual awareness, delivering exemplary user experiences in different languages is possible.
Operational Costs
Due to inbound and outbound calls being handled by voice AI chatbots, the need for hiring more human agents is lower when needing to scale up. By saving human resources, you can decrease operational costs.
Conclusion
AI voice chatbots are crucial in delivering exemplary customer service in the competitive era.
Through the continuing innovations, you can expect AI voice bots of the future to understand the context more accurately and respond more conversationally through advanced NLP and neural networks. There is great hype around developing multimodal voice bots capable of delivering a comprehensive and accessible service experience to customers.
Take advantage of these trends and develop a custom voice bot with an AI voice that matches your brand's personality. Launch your business into the future with Murf AI’s extensive AI voice library for your voice bots.
Sign up to try out Murf AI for free today.

Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between AI voice and neural voice?
A Neural voice is a more advanced AI voice that sounds human-like as compared to the previous generation of AI voices, which sounded robotic.
What is the role of speech recognition in a voice chatbot?
It plays the key role of processing speech to text, filtering the background noise, understanding the spoken content, and selecting responses accurately.
Why is NLP necessary in a voice chatbot?
NLP is the crucial component that helps a voice bot understand the intent of a user’s query. This is essential to generate a relevant response that answers their questions.
How does text to speech (TTS) help a voice chatbot?
The TTS component in a voice bot kicks in after speech recognition has identified the correct input in text format. TTS then converts this response into audio for output.