Considering using chatbots and voicebots to amplify your support process? And wondering which one suits the best for your business and your team as well? Read on!

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of technological advancements in the 21st century. The technology powers everything from smart speakers to self-driving cars. Its beauty lies in its ability to learn continually and teach itself to adapt to different situations, making it self-sufficient.  

AI has grown at a rapid pace over the past decade, with adoption rising fast. Deloitte’s report on artificial intelligence estimates that 75% of businesses will invest in AI-powered technologies soon. 

One application of artificial intelligence that has fundamentally changed the way we conduct business is using AI assistants that can automate tasks for us. Chatbots and voicebots are great examples of AI-powered tech. These nifty bots can be the difference between a great customer experience and a terrible one. 

Conversational AI is a great way to engage with customers and optimise your customer support processes to be more efficient. Juniper Research estimates that voice assistant-based transactions will increase 320% by 2023 to a whopping $19.4 billion!

In this blog, we’ll break down the key differences between voicebots and chatbots so you can make an informed decision on which of the two is ideal for your business. 

The tech behind voicebots and chatbots – Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Before delving into voicebot vs chatbot, we’ll talk about the one glaring similarity in both. We’re talking about what goes on behind the scenes when you engage with a voicebot or a chatbot – NLP. For voicebot, the technology goes a step further with ASR.

NLP is a technology that harnesses the power of AI to allow computers or bots to communicate with humans using natural language seamlessly.  The NLP market is expected to balloon to 14 times its size in 2017 by 2025 as more investment pours into the cutting edge tech. 

Here’s how NLP works: It compares the input with the large dataset that it’s been trained with to identify parts-of-speech and breaks it down into smaller fractions. It then analyses how these different parts of the input could relate to each other to make sense. Natural language understanding (NLU) is a subset of NLP that allows the computer to understand the intent behind messages and be more intuitive. 

While NLP helps both voicebots and chatbots, voice AI additionally uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to break complex human speech into fractions that are easily consumed and understood by the algorithm. (Also read: Top speech recognition challenges and how to tackle them)

So, what sets chatbots and voicebots apart?

Voicebots vs chatbots – what sets them apart?

Deploying an AI assistant on your website could do wonders for your customer experience, assist your support team with high call volumes and attend to customers around the clock with no downtime. But the question arises, which of the two should you prefer for your businesses? The main difference between voicebots and chatbots is that the voicebots work on voice commands or directives, whereas chatbots don’t.

Let’s dive into the strengths both of these conversational AI bots bring to the table.

Why should you consider a voicebot?

1. Communicate quickly using your voice

With voicebots, you can communicate with the AI just by speaking to it. Voicebots are ideal for people of all demographics and age groups. The ease of use makes it easy even for those who aren’t particularly tech-savvy to use the bot and still have a great experience. 

2. More engaging customer experience

Voicebots work like speaking to someone over a telephone call, just like dialling a number on the phone or WhatsApp. This increase in engagement and consistency in communication can set your website apart from the competition in terms of customer experience. It can be to interact with the AI to see how it responds to what you say. It’s also capable of being trained to use humour and other engaging content. 

3. Wider integration 

You can easily integrate your voicebot with your CRM or even allow it to be accessed through smart speakers, so your customers can directly speak to your AI voicebot no matter seamlessly right from their home. Again, this makes for a more engaging and seamless customer experience. Juniper Research estimates that voice assistant-based transactions will increase 320% by 2023 to a whopping $19.4 billion! This rapid adoption will bring even more integration possibilities to voicebots in the future. 

Now, making a case for chatbots

1. The go-to for nonlinear user journeys

Chatbots are excellent for working through complex chat flows. It is ideal for non-linear user journeys where the chatbot displays many options that need not be remembered. Chatbots simplify complicated use cases with user-friendly interfaces.

2. Easier to train

Training a chatbot is much easier than training a voicebot. There are larger datasets of text-based data available compared to voice data. Users tend to speak longer sentences when using voicebots and type out shorter sentences on chatbots. Another critical factor is that chatbots rely primarily on the choice of words to understand the user. On the other hand, voicebots also need to consider modulation, tone, and other spoken language factors.

3. Do more with audio-visual media

Chatbots can communicate using not just text but also audio-visual media like pictures, videos, GIFs and more! This can make the experience richer and more engaging, but voicebots are confined to audio-based media.

The bottomline – voicebots or chatbots?

There is no one size fits all answer to this question. If you’re wondering which one is better between chatbots vs voicebots – it depends on what works the best for your customers and the kind of issues you are planning to solve at hand.

An excellent way to find the sweet spot for your business is by finding the overlap between your business’s goals and your users’ goals. Other considerations include the volume of information to be transmitted, the types of media that can be used, and whether the user journey is linear or nonlinear.