TymeBank, a 120 employee bank in South Africa, puts AI powered chatbot to work in competing against much bigger financial institutions that have 15,000 employees or more. “Deploying these technologies for us is not a luxury. It is a critical part of the long-term strategy,” Typme Bank CEO, Coenraad Jonker, said in the American Banker article titled - ‘This technology is not a luxury’: TymeBank CEO on AI chatbot.

Mr. Jonker is not alone.  We are seeing rapid adoption of AI chatbots. According to a recent research report – Global Conversational Systems Market 2019-2024: Highly Advanced AI and NLP Tools Bolstering the Market Growth – “ The global conversational systems market size to grow from USD 4.6 billion in 2019 to USD 17.4 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 30.8% during 2019–2024. The major growth drivers for the market include highly advanced AI and NLP tools and increasing demand for AI-powered customer support services.”

So, what is a chatbot anyway? A chatbot, sometimes referred to as virtual assistant, is a cognitive computing system that acts like a human operator in engaging, guiding, and providing users with contextually relevant information.  It is based upon the Natural Language Question Answering technique that allows a user to pose everyday questions, processes the questions to determine the informational requirements, and delivers information against such requirements. It can ask clarifying questions to decipher the user’s intent, helping to pinpoint the correct answer. Powered by artificial Intelligence (AI), a chatbot or virtual assistant continuously learns from new information to refine its effectiveness in delivering the most relevant and accurate responses.

For your chatbot to be effective, it needs to address a wide variety of incoming questions most of which we have no control over. However, the good news is that there are generally three types of questions:

1. Repetitive - These are the FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to which standard answers are available. For example, ‘how do you do a wire transfer?’ or ‘what is international roaming?’
2. Factual - These are inquiries that can addressed by up-to-date facts. For example, ‘what is the interest rate for a 5 year car loan’? or ‘what is the roaming data rate in country X’?
3. Verbatim – These are questions requiring the extraction of passages which will be presented verbatim as the answers. For example, ‘what is Federal Reserve Bank’s announcement on interest rate?’ or ‘what is Apple’s iphone announcement?’

Not only does a chatbot need to provide contextually relevant responses in the face of increasing inquiry volume and diversity, it is critical for it to enable simple curation of responses to support FAQs,  easy fact and passage extractions, and streamlined tracking and auditing of information exchanges to satisfy compliance requirements in industries such as financial services.

Micro Focus IDOL for Virtual Assistant is an AI chatbot solution powered by Micro Focus IDOL. It is uniquely designed to handle all three types of questions above. Visit our solution page to see how it can help you deliver highly quality and cost effective services.