Going Deep with a Robot
Siri, Alexa, Cortana; voice-controlled assistants are everywhere and the conversations we can have with robots nowadays are getting more and more human-like, since our virtual interlocutors are able to learn, memorize, and continuously develop autonomously.
As the conversational skills of voice assistants and chatbots improve, the interest of customers in interacting with them increases. A representative survey by Bitkom Research, Germany’s digital association, showed that one out of four citizens wants to interact with a chatbot (e.g. when making an appointment or buying tickets for an event). That said, conversational AI is a hot topic in the industry, especially considering that the underlying technology can be integrated into a multitude of channels, with voice assistants or chatbots being just two choices.
Testbirds Partners with the Market Leader in Conversational AI
At Testbirds, we recently announced a strategic partnership with Cognigy, the market leader in conversational AI. This will allow us to support companies with the analysis of conversations between chatbots and/or voice assistants with end-customers to evaluate optimization potential to improve both customer experience and overall satisfaction. Cognigy provides a platform where companies can build complex, integrated process automation solutions for the use of cognitive bots. The smart bots meet all the requirements for an effective and intelligent communication with the end-customer. Instead of just answering simple questions through the recognition of key words, one can create organic and complex conversations using Cognigy’s signature platform Cognigy.AI. This is all accomplished with the help of a flow and process editor based on various machine learning algorithms. Since Chatbot & Virtual Assistant Testing is one of the Testbirds Exclusive products in our testing portfolio, we’re already quite experienced in Conversational AI. However, cooperating with Cognigy allows us to take our AI game on the next level, as well as offer more advantages to our clients in the future. “The partnership with Cognigy allows us to increase our service portfolio in the field of costumer experience. As conversational AI plays an increasingly larger role in the marketing mix, Cognigy’s software will be of great value and benefit for our common clients“, stated Philipp Benkler, Co-Founder and CEO of Testbirds.
Chatbots and How to Test Them
Earlier this year, Judith Michel, a UX-specialist from our Project Management Team, wrote a blog post discussing the UX design process of chatbots and how it differs from the “traditional” bot for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Apart from the design aspect, one other important step when implementing conversational AI into customer-facing processes is testing.The interaction between a customer and a chatbot is much more unpredictable than when a customer uses an app or website where he/she has a foreseeable pre-selection of decisions in the form of clickable elements. What’s more, the syntactic diversity of natural languages as well as spelling or grammar errors pose further major challenges. When testing chatbots, it is therefore vital to keep every possible eventuality in mind. At Testbirds, we test conversational AI with the help of our crowd of international testers. This way, the language capability of chatbots and voice assistants are tested under everyday conditions and with the right target group, in all different languages and dialects. Additionally, Chatbot & Virtual Assistant Testing reveals not only issues regarding language ability and information processing of AI, but also provides training data sets that can be used to address weaknesses and close language gaps. As we’ve seen from past Chatbot Testing scenarios, an iterative approach is particularly useful for development. It allows for continuous improvements to be ensured, especially with regards to the learning ability of the bot. With every additional iteration, the bot gets “smarter”, meaning that it’s able to answer more inquiries correctly.
Stay Tuned!
With Cognigy as a partner, we will have some exciting and cutting-edge AI testing projects coming soon. We are very much looking forward to that and will keep you updated with more blog posts, case studies, and a webinar at the end of May.
