What are AI Voice Agents?
When did you last use a voice command to get a search result? Probably not long ago. That’s because voice assistant platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri have become an indispensable part of our world.
Today, the mere idea of managing our day-to-day lives without these tools feels daunting. Did you know that over 41% of adults use voice search at least once daily? But is AI in voice interaction limited to setting alarms and turning on lights? Well, not really.
The AI voice assistant tools we use are part of the bigger speech recognition technology, AI voice agents. While AI voice assistants handle everyday tasks like controlling smart home devices and setting reminders, AI voice agents are more advanced and tailored for industry-specific applications.
They can include tasks such as answering customer queries and automating appointment booking, which lowers operational costs.
Curious to learn more? In this blog, we’ll learn about AI voice agents, how they work, their types, and real-world applications. Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
Inside AI Voice Agents: The Tech That Powers Them
AI voice agents rely on the following four core technologies to function effectively:
1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
A branch of artificial intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP), focuses on enabling AI-driven voice agents to understand and process human speech. It allows virtual AI voice agents to break down and interpret messages and generate meaningful, useful, and understandable responses.
In AI voice recognition software, NLP applications involve parsing user commands, context and intent recognition, entity extraction, and response generation. These work together to enable voice agents to understand and respond to user inquiries accurately.
2. Machine Learning (ML) Algorithms
Machine learning algorithms are sets of rules and techniques that enable AI systems to recognize patterns in data and conduct tasks based on them. In the case of AI-based voice agents, applying ML algorithms ensures that an agent’s accuracy and responsiveness are high.
These algorithms enable the voice agent to make predictions and adapt to new inputs, fostering continuous improvement without explicit programming.
Implementing ML algorithms in an AI voice agent generator has several pros, such as facilitating voice generation, response personalization, and dialogue management.
3. Speech Recognition
Speech Recognition (Speech to Text, or STT) is an AI technology that enables conversational AI solutions to recognize, understand, and translate spoken human language into written text. This facilitates a Voice User Interface (VUI) for human-computer interactions.
In AI voice agent apps, STT captures audio and preprocesses it to remove background noise. It then breaks down the audio file into smaller segments to extract pitch, tone, speech patterns, and other features. These features are matched against an acoustic model to identify phonemes, which are further processed to form words and sentences for text output.
Additionally, STT enhances security and personalization by using own voice biometrics to authenticate the speaker's identity through unique voice characteristics, such as diverse accents, natural pauses, narration style, etc. This enables tailored and secure interactions.
4. Text to Speech (TTS)
Text-to-speech (TTS) technology enables computers to convert text into speech through facilities like speech synthesis. For AI voice agents online, text-to-speech is mainly used to provide spoken responses.
It involves analyzing the text input, synthesizing it into phonetic sounds, and generating natural-sounding voice output. This enables a voice agent to communicate effectively with users.
What Are the Different Types of AI Voice Agents?
Several types of AI voice agents make life easier. Let's look at the four most prevalent ones:
1. Virtual assistants
AI voice assistant software is designed for personal use. It is versatile, easy to access, and one of the most widely recognized AI voice agent types used daily. Two of the most common examples of virtual assistants are Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.
According to data, approximately 97% of smartphone users use these tools for various routine tasks, such as playing music, setting alarms, checking the weather, etc.
2. Customer service bots
Businesses use specialized AI voice agents to automate customer support. Their main purpose is to handle repetitive tasks like taking outbound calls, answering common FAQs, and processing orders.
However, some advanced tools can also handle individual customer queries without human supervision. In this context, two of the best AI voice agents are IBM Watson Assistant and Google Dialogflow.
3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems
With the integration of AI-powered intelligent voice agents, IVR systems have also become advanced. Businesses mainly gather information and route calls to appropriate resources using AI-powered voice agents. This reduces wait times by ensuring faster resolutions, which enables customers to interact more efficiently.
For example, banks use interactive IVR systems to help customers check their account balances, transaction histories, and other information, which reduces time and costs.
4. Embedded voice agents
Embedded voice agents are integrated into hardware devices like smart TVs, wearables, automobiles, etc. They offer voice control features for certain functions, such as turning on smart lights or navigating GPS on a smart car system.
For example, AI voice assistants in cars like BMW’s Intelligent Personal Assistant and smart home devices like Google Nest.
What Are the Top Use Cases of AI Voice Agents?
AI voice agents offer many implementation opportunities for personal and professional purposes. Let's look at the top uses below:
1. Customer support
Tools like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa are designed to handle routine, time-consuming tasks. They manage processes like answering questions and troubleshooting programs to guide users through repetitive procedures like resetting passwords or checking account balances.
This enables human customer support agents to investigate more complex queries that require advanced knowledge and emotional understanding, thus enhancing customer experience.
2. Education and training
Since AI voice agents have NLP capabilities, they can interact with users in sophisticated ways to provide personalized results. This allows them to be used for education and training purposes, too.
For instance, they can use the STT functionality to help students with homework, answer questions in real time via TTS, and offer language practice support through interactive conversations.
3. Smart home automation
AI voice agents are the core technology behind home automation. They enable users to perform various daily tasks, such as setting reminders, controlling lights, adjusting thermostats, managing security systems, and controlling other home appliances through a simple voice command via tools like Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
4. Healthcare and telemedicine
AI voice agents speed up and streamline many healthcare and telemedicine management aspects. For instance, they can monitor patient status, send medication reminders at scheduled times, book appointments through voice commands, etc.
Moreover, since this technology is based on ML, it provides users valuable mental health support through conversational therapy, guided breathing exercises, and other such activities, making healthcare more accessible.
The Future of AI Voice Agents Exploring the Technology’s Tomorrow
If you think AI voice agents are advanced, you are unaware of the technology’s unleashed potential. So get ready here are a few trends and innovations that are all set to disrupt the landscape of AI voice agents:
1. Enhanced interactions
Although AI voice agents can handle most customer interactions independently, they lack advanced contextual awareness. So, they still need a human supervisor to tackle complex conversations. While this isn’t a major deterrent, it limits their scope.
The next generation of AI voice agents will have enhanced NLP and machine learning capabilities to eliminate this. This will enable them to grasp caller intent more granularly, eliminating the need for human intervention and improving user satisfaction.
2. Increased personalization
AI voice agents can generate personalized outputs. However, for deeper customization, they need additional context. Nevertheless, you won’t need to worry about that in the coming days.
With the help of robust data analytics tools and techniques, these agents can generate highly personalized outputs based on user behavior, preferences, and history. This is expected to be exclusively helpful for businesses wishing to offer a tailored customer experience to all their users.
3. Rise in utility
Implementing AI voice agents is limited to customer support automation for most businesses. But that’s going to change.
As we enter a new decade, this technology is anticipated to automate a broader range of industries and business operations. Its implementation in sectors like healthcare, finance, and education may boom.
4. Improvement in multilingual capabilities
While AI voice agents specialize in multiple languages, one can agree—there’s still ample room for improvement in output accuracy.
Hence, future versions of this technology will not only be able to facilitate multilingual support but also have precision and accuracy levels that are expected to be flawless. Moreover, the overall interaction experience is also anticipated to improve, with ultra-realistic voices and spot-on language-specific nuances like accent, dialect, tonality, etc.
5. IoT integration
AI voice agents are expected to be integrated with a wide range of personal and professional IoT (Internet of Things) devices, such as smart security cameras, tracking devices, wearables, and whiteboards. Currently, this integration is more commonly seen with home automation tools.
Thus, in the future, you may be able to connect your AI voice agents with your favorite apps and tools. This will facilitate daily life and make office management effortless and more streamlined.
6. Better privacy
Privacy is a major concern with any AI-powered tool, including voice agents. The technology is notorious for collecting user data without prior authorization, heightening the risk of data breaches. However, this may no longer be an issue in the future.
As AI advances, researchers are expected to address the ethical issues related to its use. As a result, you will be able to provide a safer, more satisfying user experience to your customers and enhance your brand’s personality.
So, Will AI Agents Replace Humans?
There is no definite answer to this question.
Yes, AI voice agents are becoming increasingly advanced with every passing day. They are already handling multiple routine tasks (pretty incredible!). As further developments occur, they may also be able to facilitate complex, time-sensitive ones that, so far, require human touch.
But that said, it’s important to note that this advancement is more about job metamorphosis than replacement.
In simple words, regardless of how feature-rich AI voice agents become or how many unique voices they speak, a certain degree of human involvement will still be needed to execute a task efficiently.
While it is debatable whether these agents can fully replace humans, they will undoubtedly free up employees' time, allowing them to focus on high-priority tasks and paving the way for organizational growth and development.
Bottom Line
AI voice agents are a coming-of-age technology with the potential to revolutionize human-computer interactions. From acting as your everyday virtual assistant to managing your experience with customer support services, these tools facilitate many aspects of day-to-day living for you and your business.
So, leverage this technology without any further ado. Implement AI voice agent tools in your processes to make your systems more efficient and intelligent.
In this context, you can check out Murf Studio. Murf, an effective AI voice generator, helps you create efficient AI voice agents with improved speech synthesis capabilities.
FAQs
1. Can AI voice agents understand multiple languages?
AI voice agents can understand numerous languages to cater to a global audience. This feature depends on their specific AI system and NLP capability. It enables them to understand other languages and respond accordingly, with the same unique accent, dialect, etc.
2. How do AI voice agents handle complex queries?
AI voice agents are mostly self-sufficient in handling complex queries. NLP and machine learning algorithms break down a query into smaller parts to analyze its context, intent, entities, etc., to develop a relevant resolution to increase customer satisfaction.
However, if the complexity of the query is beyond their scope, AI voice agents forward it to a human agent for resolution.
3. Can AI voice agents be integrated with other systems?
Yes, AI voice agents can be integrated with other systems. Generally, they are integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) devices to facilitate control through voice commands.
For example, AI voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant are used for smart home automation, such as managing smart lights, security systems, music systems, etc.
