As technology continues to evolve, so do the methods of conducting business. E-commerce has transformed the way we shop, making it easier and more convenient than ever before. However, even as e-commerce has grown in popularity, it has become clear that there is still room for improvement. The rise of conversational commerce is one such improvement, which has the potential to revolutionize the way we shop online.

Conversational commerce refers to the use of chatbots, messaging apps, voice assistants, and other conversational interfaces to facilitate communication between customers and businesses. By integrating conversational interfaces into e-commerce, businesses can provide personalized and frictionless experiences to their customers, enabling them to interact with brands in a more human-like way. This approach is particularly useful for e-commerce, where the customer journey is often fragmented and complex.

Revolutionizing Customer Experiences: Walmart’s Move into Conversational AI

One company that has embraced conversational commerce is Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. Walmart has been experimenting with conversational interfaces since 2015 when it launched its chatbot on Facebook Messenger. This chatbot enabled customers to search for products, place orders, and track deliveries through a conversational interface. In 2017, Walmart expanded its conversational commerce efforts by partnering with Google to offer voice-activated shopping through Google Assistant. This allowed customers to add items to their Walmart shopping cart using only their voice.

Walmart’s conversational commerce efforts have had a significant impact on its e-commerce business. The chatbot on Facebook Messenger has been particularly successful, with over 40% of customers who interact with the bot making a purchase. Additionally, Walmart has reported that customers who use conversational interfaces spend on average 2.5 times more than those who don’t.

Unlocking the Power of Conversational Commerce

One of the key advantages of conversational commerce is that it enables businesses to provide a more personalized shopping experience. By using data analytics and artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces can learn about a customer’s preferences and behavior, and use that information to make personalized recommendations. This is particularly useful for e-commerce, where customers often have to sift through thousands of products to find what they’re looking for. With conversational interfaces, customers can simply ask for recommendations and receive tailored suggestions.

The ability to interact with customers in real-time is another benefit of conversational commerce.  By using messaging apps or chatbots, businesses can provide instant service and answer customer queries quickly and efficiently. This is particularly useful for e-commerce, where customers may have questions about products or delivery times. And by providing real-time support, businesses can significantly reduce customer frustration while increasing overall customer satisfaction.

The purchasing experience in an online store can be confusing and complicated. Conversational commerce enables businesses to streamline the customer journey. By using conversational interfaces, businesses can guide customers all the way through to checkout, providing step-by-step guidance through the entire purchasing process and making online shopping easier and more intuitive.

Choosing the right AI assistant platform

One of the most exciting developments in conversational commerce is the emergence of AI-powered conversational agents like Alan AI. Alan AI is an AI-powered conversational agent that enables businesses to provide personalized and conversational experiences to their customers. By using natural language processing and machine learning, Alan AI can understand customer queries and respond in a way that feels human-like.

Alan AI is particularly useful for e-commerce, where customers may have complex queries that require a human-like understanding. For example, a customer may ask about the availability of a particular product in a specific color and size. Alan AI can understand the query and provide a personalized response, enabling the customer to complete their purchase in a seamless and frictionless manner.

The key advantage of Alan AI is that it is multimodal and enables businesses to scale their conversational commerce efforts quickly and efficiently. 

We’re proud to announce Ramco Systems in partnership with Alan AI bringing a live webinar on the launch of voice AI solutions for the aviation industry. Industry leaders Mark Schulz, Ramu Sunkara from Alan AI, and Michael Clark from Ramco Systems will be answering your questions about cost savings, operational efficiency, and hands-free use with voice AI.

Technicians can complete line maintenance hands-free in just minutes to determine air worthiness (have 50mins to complete inspections each time a flight/helicopter lands), file discrepancies, and retrieve any content from fault isolation manuals with voice commands. Airlines will derive immediate cost savings, get things done right the first time, and have faster onboarding and training of technicians with the voice AI deployments.

The webinar is scheduled for 12:00 IST on September 15th, 2022, register here.

In the webinar, you will see the future of aviation maintenance operations with Ramco aviation applications and Alan AI intelligent voice assistants.

We’re looking forward to answering your questions in the webinar.

As time goes on, more companies actively integrate voice assistants into their platforms. As a result, businesses are taking steps forward and incorporating Alan’s artificial intelligence into their applications. With voice, you experience a shift in daily operations, resolutions, productivity, efficiency, customer loyalty, and communication. Alan AI allows improvements that help companies grow while supplying them with the materials to add voice and produce high-quality content for all who engage with conversational AI.

As the voice interface platform, we have generated 100+ use cases. Here is a selection that highlights how voice can change your enterprise for the better:

Healthcare: 

1. Rapidly deploy results from tests/scans for patients to understand their diagnosis. 
2. Schedule medical appointments. 
3. Check essential doctor’s notes and messages. 
4. Regulate patient prescription and dose amount. 
5. Monitor patient recovery, programs, and exercises. 
6. Correctly enter patient history and pre-op information. 
7. Patients can swiftly find specific doctors that cater to their needs.
8. Virtually listen to patient symptoms and requests.
9. Hands-free navigation while commuting to a secondary appointment. 
10. Doctore can provide an immediate review of patient diagnoses before meeting with them. 
11. Conduct scheduled mental health check-ins. 
12. Increase inclusivity amongst patients who better understand through a conversational experience. 
13. Conscientious workers can generate a germs-free environment by providing hands-free technology for patients. 
14. Scale patient engagement after each appointment. 
15. Hands-free referral management for providers. 
16. Navigate your way to the nearest pharmacy to pick up prescriptions. 
17. Conveniently check appointment times that work for you. 
18. Log symptoms before meeting with healthcare specialists. 
19. Virtually send emergency images of scars, rashes, stitches, etc.
20. Check patient immunization records on the spot with zero hassle. 

Healthcare Use Cases: Healthcare | Alan AI  

Education Technology: 

1. Students can easily navigate their way around large textbooks. 
2. Virtually create prep for upcoming exams and quizzes. 
3. Check availability of course textbooks. 
4. Learn how to solve mathematical equations and gauge understanding of class concepts.
5. Teachers can quickly assess who submitted homework and who was late. 
6. Virtually read aloud books and stories to students. 
7. Personalize the learning experience by catering to the learning styles of each student. 
8. Set continuous reminders for upcoming study groups. 
9. Students can organize class materials based on class syllabi.
10. Accommodate lesson plans for students who speak multiple languages with the help of spoken language understanding. 
11. Access extensive data and records located within your platform. 
12. Organize notes based on subject and importance. 
13. Increase routine learning by memorizing spelling, common phrases, languages, etc. 
14. Reschedule meetings with teachers or administrators. 
15. Conduct interactive surveys on students’ best learning practices. 
16. Alleviate teacher’s workload by providing tips and solutions for navigating a problem. 
17. Plan a better curriculum based on students’ strengths and weaknesses. 
18. Better understand the pronunciation of different languages from a human-like voice.
19. Customize exams and quizzes based on students’ needs. 
20. Students can revisit the teacher’s instructions on projects and assignments.

Education Technology Use Case: EdTech | Alan AI

Related Blogs: Voice Interface: Educational Institution Apps

Manufacturing and Logistics: 

1. Complete work orders right from a mobile device. 
2. Immediately check in at worksites by getting convenient directions to different locations. 
3. Log daily activities while drilling and servicing sites. 
4. Decrease language barriers by providing spoken language understanding. 
5. Gain access to the highest priority incidents that need assistance first. 
6. View in-depth details on problems on the job and ask questions to resolve the issue. 
7. Plan future production projects seamlessly with zero distractions. 
8. First responders stay up to date on safety guidelines for upcoming emergencies. 
9. Receive detailed feedback on how to troubleshoot manufacturing errors. 
10. Submit a scaffolding ticket when hands are preoccupied with another task. 
11. Report discrepancies that occur on a job site. 
12. Hands-free access to invoices and requests for quotes. 
13. Provide directions for those who are visually impaired. 
14. Schedule field operations quickly in advance. 
15. Supply contractor estimation software to employees. 
16. Quickly reroute based on cancellations or rescheduling. 
17. Message clients on the go about your estimated time of arrival. 
18. Check production status on new manufacturing tools. 
19. First responders can accessible navigate their way around disastrous complications. 
20. Check incident status as you’re on the way to an emergency while keeping your eyes on the road.

Manufacturing and Logistics Use Cases: Manufacturing | Alan AI  and Logistics | Alan AI

Related Blog: Intelligent Voice Interfaces: Higher Productivity in MRO

Food and Restaurants: 

1. Customers can self-order from an in-store kiosk or display system. 
2. Release suggestions from previous orders submitted. 
3. Adjust orders based on dietary restrictions. 
4. Make suggestions from consumers’ cravings.
5. Easily order cultural food in the native language with the assistance of spoken language understanding. 
6. Consumers can locate where the closes restaurant are for requested food options.
7. Pay for food/delivery on the go. 
8. Customers can access delivery order time and check how fast they can receive food services.
9. Food services can measure feedback from interactive survey questions.  
10. Acquire recommendations based on the popularity of the product. 
11. Generate order suggestions based on special ingredients. 
12. Ask and receive questions on how to take advantage of app rewards before purchasing.
13. Search for food based on the highest-rated restaurants on delivery services. 
14. Rate customer satisfaction after ordering food.
15. Look up which pizza is available for delivery and which are for pickup.
16. Replace/add food or beverages before heading to check out. 
17. Track daily invoices and production progress from the previous month.
18. Advertise new food items and virtually gauge interest from consumers.  
19. Generate daily operational checklist for restaurant employees.
20. Create store-specific grocery lists while driving to the store. 

Food and Restaurant Use Cases: Food Ordering | Alan AI 

Others: 

1. Employees can make quick phone calls to superiors. 
2. Consumers can review credit scores from banking applications. 
3. Personalize users’ experiences by catering to their specific needs. 
4. Learn how to increase your credit score and how long it will take. 
5. Move between pages on your apps. 
6. Sign consumers up for promotional offers that boost revenue.
7. Suggest potential gifts for customers based on likes and dislikes. 
8. Report malfunctions from appliances and request new shipments. 
9. Decrease onboarding errors from newly hired employees by equipping them with the same procedures.
10. Receive tips on how to improve customer satisfaction based on survey questions given to users.
11. Generate 24/7 customer support straight from your application. 
12. Sign up for promotions within brands. 
13. Schedule package pickups from home or in the office. 
14. Search real estate based on special locations.
15. Easy access to staff applications located in numerous files. 
16. Efficiently log and access daily reports. 
17. Order a new credit card on the spot. 
18. Receive quick updates on patient news or updates. 
19. Receive directions on troubleshooting through errors. 
20. Reduce inventory errors with voice confirmation. 

Other Use Cases: Onboarding and Adoption Use Case | Alan AI

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your enterprise, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver precisely that. Email us at sales@alan.app

Alan AI has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand the human voice within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations rather than robotic ones. Voice-based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system reiterate inputs, provide an unmatched end-user experience.

For decades we had to manually click and go through multiple steps to navigate our way around applications. Take our televisions for example; we continuously use buttons on remotes to search for different settings or entertainment. Today, a different kind of button is taking over; voice interfaces have revolutionized how we interact with our applications. While watching your favorite show, you can easily switch channels or settings with a simple voice command. It cancels out the frustration, anxiety, and chaos that comes with figuring out how to use different devices. 

AI voice assistants have been an essential part of the new digital age. Like remotes, the days when we clicked countless buttons to get around are behind us. The same goes for mobile and website apps. No more will businesses need designated customer service to answer questions or have a line of users on hold. No more will enterprises need a survival guide for consumers to roam through their applications. No more will chatbots not be able to meet the needs of their customers from a couple of commands. Voice technology combats all the negatives entwined with trying to figure out any application. 

With voice assistants, gone are the days when you abandon a complex app that you do not understand. Alan provides a voice to your existing platforms, leading to increased customer loyalty and adoption of any app. With 99.5% accuracy, your voice is heard through a hands-free, easy-to-use, conversational experience.

Moreover, setting your business app up with voice recognition is easy with Alan. Our platform equips you with all the necessities needed to get your voice assistant up and running: 

1. A developer-friendly suite of tools: Alan Studio allows you to test conversational scenarios and tailor dialogue that best suits your platform and its future production environment.  

2.  Instant Integration for any platform: No changes need to be made to your existing application to have an intelligent voice. Add our lightweight SDK and deploy to IOS, Web, Android, and cross-platform solutions like React, Flutter, Native, Apache Cordova, or Ionic. 

3. Advanced Conversational Analytics: Alan adds a human-like experience that detects accurate and cultivated dialogue, utterances, sequences, and behaviors when customers interact. 

Uncomplicated steps like these make it easier to say goodbye to pressing multiple buttons on your apps and hello to the most vital button of them all; the Alan button.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your enterprise, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver exactly that. Email us at sales@alan.app

Alan has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice-based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.

Today’s voice platforms do NOT work for mission-critical Apps.

We are entering the era of Voice which combined with AI has the potential to transform every business. There will be 200 billion connected devices by 2025 and Voice will be the primary interface to interact with them which hints at the scale of transformation ahead with voice. Our vision is to lead the Voice AI era by building the world’s most accurate Spoken Language Understanding for mission-critical daily operations in every enterprise. Here are a few challenges we are experiencing in building our Voice and AI service and the excitement as well as the challenges with the adoption.

The above picture illustrates the five steps in a Voice AI service. Voice input can be picked up from any microphone and sent to the speech recognition service either on the device on in the cloud. Once the speech is converted to text, the natural language understanding of the intent is processed and text is generated for the reply. In the last step, the reply text is synthesized into speech and sent to the users.

The following are some of the key challenges in developing an effective Voice AI service. 

1. Spoken Language is different from Written Language. When speaking, people don’t always follow grammar, use punctuation, and often split their sentences. The Neural Networks from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) introduce errors. Users tend to use more anaphoras to convey their intents. Lastly, when writing, a person can go back and edit sentences, but for a speaker, it’s not possible, corrections are appended to the sentence. All of these make the NLU trained on written data sets not work well for spoken language understanding.
   
2. Names and Entity recognition (NER) is hard for most Automatic Speech Recognition services. For example, Google Speech Recognition (or Microsoft or Amazon) will not always give the correct results for names. For example, for the spoken name “Ronjon” Google returns “1 John”, “Call John”, “Long John”, “Ron John”, etc.  These responses from AI services have to be considered as “hints” which need to be augmented to infer as “Ronjon”.
   
3. The next challenge with Voice services is natural conversational experiences. Our human conversation has interrupts, pauses, and varying sentences. Due to privacy concerns, the consumer voice services from Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have to use a wake-word (Siri, Alexa, Google, Cortana) and offer a request-response conversation which limits the scope of these services for extended use. Hence, the current consumer voice products have conversations that are less than one minute.
   
   The next-generation Voice AI services will overcome the above three shortcomings. We at Alan AI have developed a unique technology of spoken language understanding that is based on the application context that gives unparalleled accuracy and flexibility. Alan (https://alan.app/blog/) is a complete Voice AI Platform and the market leader for developers to deploy and manage in-app voice assistants, and voice interfaces for mobile and web apps.  W are looking forward to helping the business world realize the ROIs by deploying Voice AI solutions. We expect all Apps to pass the “Turing Test” in the near future. 

At first it was the deadly buzz of the pandemic, and now it’s the thunder of markets crashing and lightening flashing an impending recession. Will restaurant owners have no relief? Restaurants were just opening up and attending to the happy crowds as COVID ebbed, when out-of-the-blue the stock market nosedived. Complicating the state of affairs is a labor shortage in restaurants and signs for “Help Wanted’ are way to common. Given the precarious climate, owners cannot pay their employees high wages as profit margins have been squeezed for many restaurants. What do they do?

Voice Technology Helps Ease the Shortage

Voice automation is a cost-effective solution with long-term benefits. It creates back-end operational efficiency and lends a hand in front-end ordering, easing any lack of available labor. You can easily give back an hour to each employee with an intelligent voice assistant.

Backend Operational Efficiencies

A. Tasks: The voice assistant is a hands-free buddy who reminds an employee to login, enter work schedules, complete tasks, adhere to special instructions etc. When the employee finishes a task, he can just inform the voice assistant and the app will automatically check off the task. No need to take off gloves to touch and type task fulfillment in apps. And nothing beats a friendly voice prompt to remind employees to complete tasks in a timely manner. Operational efficiencies = cost savings. It is estimated that approximately 5 seconds are shaved off per task by using an intelligent voice assistant.

B. Order Fulfillment

Modern kitchens have Kitchen-Display-Systems with screens that can bring up orders according to priority, highlight special dietary requests, flag ad hoc changes, and showcase item inventory. With voice technology, the employee no longer needs to take out time to read the screen or re-engage with it while he steps away to get something- as it audibly prompts the employee for order fulfillment. The employee can ask questions and get intelligent and accurate responses if he did not understand the prompt. The hands-free voice assistant enables every restaurant employee to save approximately 10 seconds per order fulfillment.

Front-end Operational Efficiencies

Adding voice tech to restaurant food ordering mobile or web apps save precious employee time in taking the order, ensuring accuracy of order, getting payment etc. The customer orders on an app and can either get the food delivered at home or the office or can pick-up from the restaurant premises. Lengthy menus and frequent changes to the restaurant food items are common, making voice user interfaces faster and more desirable than using a touch screen. Instead of touch and type, swipes, and going through menu items, users can simply ask the app for their menu choice, exactly the way they want it, and get their items ordered in a few seconds, thus increasing their satisfaction.

A touchless restaurant kiosk facilitate a self-service, unhurried experience, and reduce the potential health risks of touch screens. Industry calculations indicate that each drive thru order is $1.56 vs one penny for a voice activated order. Kiosks have the potential to significantly increase each ticket size by prompting upsells and cross-sells, and making personalized menu recommendations based on historical buyer behavior.

Additional Benefits

Besides resolving the labor shortage and operational costs, voice technology can reduce food wastage and makes for quicker, superior customer service.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your restaurant app, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver exactly that. Email us at sales@alan.app

Alan AI has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.

An intelligent voice assistant can be a boon for increasing restaurant employee productivity and scaling operational efficiency, ensuring food safety compliance, and increasing order ticket sizes.

A heartening statistic mentions how customers are open to using voice for ordering food- 64% of Americans are interested in ordering food with the help of voice user interfaces and more than one quarter of all USA consumers who own voice activated devices have used them to order food service. Recently, Opus Research published a research report ‘The Business Value of Customized Voice Assistants’ based on a global survey of 320 business leaders in 8 industries to obtain the state of voice assistant implementation and global trendsthat recognizes that restaurateurs are rapidly realizing the benefits of voice assistants for accurate, efficient food ordering.

Voice assistants have come a long way from consumer voice experiences with products like Alexa smart speakers, Google Assistant, and Siri. Interactive, AI powered voice for business apps are inside your app and drive context-aware conversations. Using natural language, the user can navigate through the application to quickly get exactly what he wants.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech apis, text to speech, speech to text, are common technology terms tossed around as the world grapples with the rapid change from touch and type to humanlike voice interfaces for apps.

Let’s now delve into how voice assistants can be valuable to restaurant management software vendors and franchise owners.

Voice Assistants for Restaurant Management ISVs

Efficient Operational Tasks/Employee Training

A voice assistant increases efficiency and accuracy in restaurant maintenance tasks by easing the process of Real-Time Operational Reports & Notifications  The voice assistant is like a buddy who reminds an employee to login, enter work schedules, complete tasks, adhere to special instructions etc. When the employee finishes a task, he can just inform the voice assistant and the app screen will instantly check off the task as complete. Alan’s hands-free voice assistant enables every restaurant employee to shave off 5 seconds for any task that previously involved taking off gloves such as manual entries for work logs, task completion, etc. Each employee can get an hour back with the help of the voice driven automation and use the extra hours in their work shifts to perform higher level tasks to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Productivity gains = 5 secs per task x number of employees x daily tasks

For employee training, any new employee would be delighted to have an onboarding and self-service training help on-demand. With interactive instructions and reminders, training is easy and effective. Employees can now get trained in the shortest time possible and become productive on the job much faster.

Faster Food Order Tracking

Modern kitchens have display screens that can bring up orders according to priority, highlight special dietary requests, flag ad hoc changes, and showcase item inventory. 

With voice technology, the employee no longer needs to take out time to read the screen, as it audibly prompts the employee accurately for order fulfillment and the employee can ask questions and get intelligent and accurate responses if he did not understand the prompt. The hands-free voice assistant enables every restaurant employee to save approximately 10 seconds per order fulfillment and make more efficient use of their time working on food order fulfilment.

                       Productivity gains = 10 secs per order x number of orders daily

Decrease in Liability for Food Safety and Hygiene Compliance

The restaurant industry has strict safety and hygiene regulations mandated by the state and federal law agencies. Restaurants have to comply with these rules to keep their doors open. Additionally, each restaurant may have their own roster of do’s and don’ts. A voice assistant can go a long way in prompting, reminding, and quickly upgrading safety and hygiene protocols for restaurant employees, and thus reducing liability.

Voice assistants increase food safety and hygiene compliance by 3X

Voice Assistants for Restaurant Franchise Owners

A Voice enabled restaurant ordering mobile device or web app and touchless restaurant kiosk facilitate a self-service, unhurried experience, and reduce the potential health risks of touch screens. Ordering food can actually be a pleasure with a friendly voice. Moreover, industry calculations indicate that each drive thru order is $1.56 vs one penny for a voice activated order. Restaurant employees also benefit from a voice assistant that can help with some of the mundane tasks while they focus on food preparation, food presentation,  and customer service.

Lengthy menus and frequent changes to the restaurant food items are common, making voice user interfaces faster and more desirable than using a touch screen. Instead of touch and type, swipes, and going through menu items, users can simply ask the voice assistant for their menu choice, the exact way they want it, and get their items ordered in a few seconds, thus decreasing customer frustration while increasing their satisfaction.

Upselling to the customer is also easier with a voice interface.  Consider this scenario: A customer orders a burger at a kiosk. Alan’s voice assistant asks “would you like to add a side of fries for $2.00?”. A personalized, humanlike voice influences the customer to reach a faster decision and more likely a “Yes”- they may have an interest in the item but did not happen to notice it in the menu or did not have the time to look through the entire menu.

A Forbes article mentions that average ticket size increased by 20–40%  when voice assistants were used to place a food order. Therefore, an order for $10 can very easily be converted to $12 or $14 with interactive voice apps.

Wrapping it up, Voice Interfaces which interact with customers like normal conversations for food ordering, operations, and delivery are fast becoming a norm in the restaurant industry. The need for a hands-free, touchless application has gained popularity with the onset of the COVID pandemic.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your restaurant app,, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver exactly that. Write to us at sales@alan.app

Alan has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.

Building a voice interface from scratch for an enterprise app and making it responsive to the app’s UI requires lots of effort and dependencies.

With Alan’s advanced AI capabilities, developers can quickly deploy a new voice AI model in one click for their app without having to make a new app build. The Alan platform takes care of spoken language modeling, spoken language understanding (real-time speech recognition, intent, and entity classification), and ML-ops.

Overlaying Voice Interface in 3 steps

Add Alan SDK to the Client App

Add the Alan SDK to the client app, this handles assistant wake word detection, Voice and App UI sync, capturing and sending voice input to Alan Cloud.

Create Voice Script in the Alan Studio

Create the Voice Script in Alan Studio to map the voice actions with the App’s interface and business logic. The voice scripts are programmed in JavaScript, and you can find the supported voice actions methods here.

Deploy and Iterate the Voice Model

Once you’re done with all the business logic for your assistant and the voice interface mapping, click save. Alan’s backend will quickly create and train the Voice AI model for your app.

You can later easily iterate your voice model by analyzing how users are interacting with your voice assistant inside the Alan Studio.

Iterating the Voice Scripts does not require a new app build, just make changes to the voice script and save them. Alan’s backend will train the new model for you and new changes will be reflected in your enterprise app. Alan platform takes care of the deployment on the cloud for the users to instantaneously have access to the new voice dialogs and the real-time user behavior analytics.

Highlights of the Alan Platform 

The Alan Platform takes care of language modeling, voice processing, intent and entity classification, ML-ops, and all the other complexities:

• The Alan Platform’s advanced NER (Named-Entity Recognition) engine detects dialogs, utterances, and sequence segmentation with high accuracy.
  
• Alan’s SLU (Spoken Language Understanding) engine decides intent action, domain, and classifies entities based on input and current context.
  
• No need for language datasets or training data for the AI model for your app, Alan AI takes care of it. Deploy your Voice AI model for your app by just writing a dialog script in Alan Studio.
  
• Alan’s Serverless Architecture approach makes voice interaction much smoother without any lag or drop in voice responses.
  
• Get access to real-time user analytics from the Alan Studio, and analyze how users interact with your voice interface. Easily make iterations to your model without changing the app in prod.

With push-button performance, Alan Platform enables effortless ML deployment and fast iterations of the voice interfaces by allowing developers to address any new voice command rollout with cohorts while achieving instant deployments without even having to redeploy the application. 

Initially focused on mission-critical business applications for hands-free user experience, Alan AI is led by technologists and business veterans, backed by top investors committed to helping customers bring voice interfaces to Business Apps in days.

Decades ago, talking to a computer was only possible in advanced scientific labs or in science fiction stories. Today, voice assistants have become a reality of everyday life. People talk to their phone, smart speaker, doorbell, and even microwave oven. Voice is gradually becoming one of the main ways to interact with consumer applications and devices and the use of our natural language as a mode of interaction is extremely appealing. Software like text to speech (TTS), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) are used to recognize and process human language.

But while we’ve seen a lot of progress in the application of voice interfaces like google assistant or Siri in consumer applications, the business sector still lags behind, even though enterprises can be the main beneficiaries of advances in speech recognition and overall interactive voice technology. Where workers are engaged in hands-on activities and can’t interact with graphical user interfaces, voice user interfaces can make a huge difference in user engagement, productivity, and safety. However, the enterprise voice sector must overcome several challenges, one of them being privacy and security concerns. Today’s consumer voice assistants are not renowned for being very privacy friendly. There have been several documented incidents of smart speakers and voice assistants mistakenly recording conversations and replaying them elsewhere. And the massive user data that these assistants collect gets sucked into the black hole of the data-hungry tech giants that run them.

The expansion of the voice interface to your living room, car, office, pocket, and wrist has created fierce competition between tech giants. Manufacturers of smartphones, smart speakers, wearable devices and other mobile devices aim to create the ultimate voice experience that can respond to every possible query, whether it’s asking the weather, turning on the lights, responding to emails, or setting timers. Currently, the only way speech api vendors can get ahead of competitors is to improve their AI models by expanding their repertoire of actionable voice commands. This puts them in a position to have a vested interest to collect more user data and assemble larger training datasets for their AI models.

What’s also worth noting is that all major consumer voice assistants are owned by companies that  have built their business on collecting user information and creating digital profiles to serve ads, provide content and product recommendations, and keep users locked in their apps. In this regard, voice interfaces become another window for these companies to collect more data and know more about their users.

This brings us to an important takeaway: Tech giants will do anything they can to own your data because that is their key differentiating factor.

From a security and privacy standpoint, this causes several key concerns:

– These intermediaries will get to hear private conversations of enterprises’ users. For instance, if you allow a consumer voice assistant to check on your bank balance, you’re giving them access to this sensitive information.

– You don’t know what kind of data is being collected and where it is stored.

– Data is stored centrally in the servers of the voice AI provider. And as numerous security incidents have shown, centralized stores of data are attractive targets for malicious actors.

– As an enterprise, you have no ownership or control of your data and can’t use it to improve your products or gain insights about how users interact with your applications.

– In case you’re handling sensitive health, financial, or business data, you’re at the mercy of the Voice AI vendor to keep your data safe and not share it with third parties.

On the other hand, the Alan Platform is designed to ensure security and privacy for users of the enterprises and organizations. The key privacy tenet of the Alan platform is that each enterprise is the sole owner of their user conversations data. They decide where it is stored and who has access to it. And regardless of a customer’s choice for where to store their data, Alan AI secures this data, making sure it’s encrypted in transit and at rest. Not only does this model create more value for businesses in comparison to the classic voice AI platform, but it also addresses the key privacy and security pain points that organizations face when considering voice interfaces for their applications.

The Alan platform is based on solving specific problems for each enterprise, not answering every possible query in the world. Each deployment of our AI system will be tuned for one or more applications of a single enterprise.

The value of the Alan Platform does not come from creating digital profiles and selling ads and products to users, therefore there’s no incentive to collect, hoard, and monetize user data. Instead, Alan AI seeks success by creating value and helping businesses reduce costs, improve operational efficiencies and safety with employee facing deployments, and increase revenue acceleration for the customer facing deployments.

The goal is to increase ROI for businesses by deploying voice interfaces for apps being used by their customers and employees. This is why Alan AI believes every company should have full control and ownership of their data and AI models to provide the required privacy for their users. An added benefit is that the AI of each customer will improve as it continues to interact with the users of its application, and the business will have a chance to glean actionable insights from its data and develop new features and products.

Having access to the right quality and amount of data can give an enterprise the edge in providing a higher quality voice interface. Therefore, every enterprise should put data ownership and security at the center of its product innovation strategy. Will you prefer to use the technology of a company that works behind a black box, taking control and ownership of your data and not providing clear safeguards, or do you prefer to be in control of your data and work in a secure environment where you can continuously innovate and improve the voice interface of your products? If you’re in the latter camp,  the Alan Platform is for you. At Alan, we believe the future is a human voice interface to app. 

Reach out to sales@alan.app to set up a free private demo of the platform or answer any questions that you may have about the technology.

Intelligent voice interfaces for apps have become ubiquitous. From making calls to purchases, the use cases are explosive. Its use in educational institutions as a learning aid is yet to reach its full potential, but we are certain it is on the right track and can revolutionize the way students are educated. Given the hybrid learning trend, remote learning intertwined with the physical classroom, the challenge is to keep the student engaged and learning, regardless of the environment they are in.

To achieve critical education outcomes, it is important to focus on both technology and 21st century skills. Voice-based learning is an aid that includes a broad range of tools and enables a blended learning model- augmenting the learner’s experience and help educators with their teaching methodologies.

Voice tech applications are getting smarter over time with advances in artificial intelligence and their application in voice technology. Instructors  can simply ask their app “How many students submitted their homework assignment?”, “Who was absent in class today?”, “What are the instructions for today’s science fair?”, “ Summarize the progress of student Andy Jacobs” etc. Voice interfaces enable applications to give the right answer, faster.

Let us look at what makes voice technology a terrific aid in classrooms:

1. Collecting data in real-time:

Voice enabled devices are great at collecting data in real-time. Using them, teachers can record students’ engagement in class, monitor participation, attendance, etc. This is a productivity tool for teachers as they can just speak to the app instead of tedious touch and type. Moreover, built in artificial intelligence and analytics capabilities empower the instructor with data analysis and real-time insights. This empowers the instructor to quickly tackle situations that need a bias for action. 

2. Academic tracking and feedback:

The academic progress of students can be tracked over a period of time using voice interfaces. It can be done at scale for every student in the institution. It can also remind students about what is expected of them regarding assignments, deadlines, subjects they have enrolled in, etc. The institution can also use voice interfaces to deliver personalized feedback and constant updates on what is happening in the classrooms. Timely feedback on student performance is an important mechanism for management of academic outcomes- voice tech can definitely be used to accomplish this.

3. Communal learning:

When using voice interfaces, everyone in the classroom hears the same information uniformly without any bias. The students can maintain eye contact without looking down at the computer screen. The teachers also don’t have to break eye contact with the students, thereby helping build a closer rapport with the students.  

4. Accessing records:

Accessing student record details quickly is often difficult, even if you use a student information system. Voice interfaces make this an easy process as they are adept at large data sets. For example, if a teacher wants targeted information about a student, all they need to do is ask the app. It will share the information as soon as the question is asked. It is not just limited to academic records as educational institutions can get their entire data that was input into the system.

5. Personalizing learning:

Thanks to the human-like features of a voice interface, it makes learning more personal and humane for the students. Students will find it easy to follow instructions from voice interfaces because of their ability to express a wide range of emotions and voice modulations. Also, personalization means accommodating different learning styles of a student body and making some adjustments to fit their unique needs.

6. Introducing routine learning exercises:

Institutions can use voice assistants to introduce routine learning exercises such as learning words, memorizing spellings and facts, learning common phrases from foreign languages, etc. The use of voice as an aid for this is definitely a time saver for the teacher. Such methods can also positively drive engagement of students, as the voice can be blended with music to make it more appealing.

7. Customizing tests:

Voice technology can be customized according to the needs of the student. It can come with a bunch of ready-made templates that the teacher can choose from, on a whim. Moreover, a teacher can use different templates to match the diverse student personas in a classroom.

8. Storytelling:

We all love stories. Voice interfaces can be used to read stories to students. It could be specific to the subjects that are being taught or for the pure joy of listening to a story. It keeps the students engaged, but it also gives an opportunity for the teachers to rest. Interactive stories with engaging plot lines as a mode of instruction can help the student perform much better in classrooms. 

9. Controlling the environment:

Teachers can use voice interfaces to control the classroom by setting the tone with instructions. These can be repeated and also modified rapidly to inform students in the classroom on protocols for learning sessions, tests, and any special announcements.

In summary, Voice interfaces can be used to deliver an immersive learning experience and make learning more attractive to both student and instructor. They are a useful aid to the institution to deliver the right education at the right time to the right student.

The team at Alan AI will be more than happy to assist you with any questions or provide a personalized demo of our intelligent voice interface  platform. Just email us at sales@alan.app

About Alan AI:

Alan’s voice interface leverages the user context and existing UI of applications, a key to understanding responses for next-gen human voice conversations. Alan AI has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.

The evolution of Web 3.0 is fundamentally to create a more transparent, intelligent, and open internet for creators and users to share value, bringing back control of the internet from big technology players into the palm of the users.

Gavin Wood coined the term “Web 3.0” in 2014, laying out his vision of the future of the internet. Web 3.0 is underpinned by blockchain technology– to decentralize data and distribute it across devices- while reducing risks of massive data leaks by eliminating a central point of failure. 

By implementing artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with blockchain technology, Web 3.0 aims to redefine the web experience with structural changes for decentralization, democratization, and transparency in all facets of the internet.

Features of Web 3.0 include: 

The Semantic Web: A web of linked data, combining semantic capabilities with NLP to bring “smartness” to the web for computers to understand information much like humans, interpreting data by identifying it, linking it to other data, and relating it to ideas. The user can leverage all kinds of available data that allow them to experience a new level of connectivity.

Customization: Web personalization refers to creating a dynamic, relevant website experience for users based on behavior, location, profile, and other attributes.Web 3.0 is all about providing users with a more personalized experience within a secure and transparent environment.

Trust: Web 3.0’s decentralization promotes more transactions and engagement between peers. Users can trust the technology(blockchain) to perform many tasks in lieu of trusting humans for services such as contracts and transfer of ownership. Trust is implicit and automatic — leading to the inevitable demise of the middleman.

Ubiquity: IoT is adding billions of devices to the Web. That means billions of smart, sensor driven devices, being used by billions of users, by billions of app instances. These devices and apps consistently talk to each other, exchanging valuable data.

Voice Interface: A voice interface is expected to be a key element of Web 3.0, driving interactions between humans to devices to apps. One of the pivotal changes underway in technology today is the shift from user-generated text inputs to voice recognition and voice-activated functions. 

Some of the technologies used in creating voice interfaces include:

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology transcribes user speech at the system’s front end. By tracking audio signals, spoken words convert to text.  

Text to speech (TTS). A voice-enabled device will translate a spoken command into text, execute the command, and prepare a text reply. A TTS engine translates the text into synthetic speech to complete the interaction loop with the user.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) determines user intent at the back end.

Both ASR and NLU are used in tandem since they typically complement each other well for all text chat bots but not for voice interfaces. Voice has a lot of noice, accents and highly contextual on what we see at the moment and here Alan AI has developed a Global Spoken Language Understanding Model for Apps for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU)

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology understands and learns the nuances of spoken language in context, to deliver superior responses to questions, commands, and requests. It is also a discovery tool that can help and guide users with human-like conversational voice through any workflow process. When taking the needed leap to classify and categorize queries, SLU systems collect better data and personalize voice experiences. Products then become smarter and channel more empathy, empowered to anticipate user needs and solve problems quickly. Exactly in tune with the intent of Web 3.0.

The Alan AI platform is a SLU-based B2B Voice AI platform for developers to deploy and manage Voice Interfaces for Enterprise Apps- deployment is a matter of days, for any application. 

Alan’s voice interface leverage the user context and existing UI of applications, a key to understanding responses for next-gen human voice conversations. 

Alan has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched end-user experience.

Voice is no longer just for consumers. Alan’s Voice Assistants deployed in Ramco’s key enterprise business applications scale user productivity and deliver ROI. 

Alan AI and global enterprise software provider Ramco Systems have announced a key partnership to deploy in-app voice assistants for key applications. In its initial stages of partnership, the organizations will primarily focus on building business use cases for Ramco’s Aviation, and Aerospace & Defense sector, followed by those for other industry verticals including Global Payroll and HR, ERP, and Logistics.

Alan’s voice assistant technology works seamlessly with Ramco’s applications, as a simple overlay over the existing UI.  Alan provides enterprise grade accuracy of understanding spoken language for daily operations, synchronization of voice with existing graphical interfaces, and a hands-free app experience which will truly delight the user, from the very first interaction. Alan’s Voice UX also enables rapid and continuous iterations based on real-time user feedback via the analytics feature- a huge improvement over the painstakingly slow process of software development and release cycles for graphical user interfaces. Alan’s AI rapidly learns the nuances of the app’s domain language and can be deployed in a matter of days. 

 Commenting on the Alan AI-Ramco partnership, Ramesh Sivasubramanian, Vice-President – Technology & Innovation, Ramco Systems, said, “Voice recognition is a maturing technology and has been witnessing huge adoption socially, in our day-to-day personal lives. However, its importance in enterprise software has been a real breakthrough and a result of multitudinous innovations. We are excited to enable clients with this voice user interface along with Alan AI, thereby ensuring a futuristic digital enterprise”.

Alan’s voice interface leverage the user context and existing UI of applications, a key to understanding responses for next-gen human voice conversations. Alan has patent protections for its unique contextual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) technology to accurately recognize and understand human voice, within a given context. Alan’s SLU transcoder leverages the context to convert voice directly to meaning by using raw input from speech recognition services, imparting the accuracy required for mission-critical enterprise deployments and enabling human-like conversations, rather than robotic ones. Voice based interactions, coupled with the ability to allow users to verify the entered details without having the system to reiterate inputs, provides an unmatched convenient end-user experience.

Maintenance, Repair, and Operation (MRO) employees in aviation and other industries increasingly use mobile and other device-based apps to plan projects, write reports based on their observations, research repair issues, and write logs to databases etc. This is exactly where Alan’s voice interface can help- with a hands-free option to increase productivity and support safety, thereby eliminating the distraction of touch and type while working on a task.

For example, Alan’s intelligent voice interface responds to spoken human language commands such as:

User: “Hey Alan, can you help me record a discrepancy?”

Alan: “Hi Richard, sure! Navigating to the ‘Discrepancy Screen’.”

User: “Enter description- ‘Motor damage’.”

Alan: “Updated ‘Motor damaged’ in the description field”

User: “Enter corrective action- ‘Motor replaced’.”

Alan: “Updated ‘Motor replaced’ in corrective action field.”

User: “Set action as closed.”

Alan: “Updated ‘Closed’ in quick action field.”

User: “Go ahead and record the discrepancy.”

Alan: “Sure, Richard. Creating the discrepancy… You’re done. Discrepancy has been registered against the task. Please review this at the bottom of the screen.”

Alan enables friendly conversations between humans and software. It helps to create outstanding outcomes by allowing users to go hands-free as well as  error-free with the ability to instantly review generated actions.

 Alan plans to continuously augment the voice experience to improve employee productivity with voice in their daily operations. Voice can now support a vision of a hands free, productive, and safe environment for humans.

Please view and share the Alan-Ramco partnership announcement on LinkedIn and Twitter

Smart technology is changing the way work gets done, regardless of the industry. It enables simple requests and provides efficient services for various industries, including the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) industry. 

The equipment in the MRO industry needs regular servicing. Industries such as aviation have particularly complex maintenance procedures.  Servicing them requires organized knowledge of the user guides and manuals. The procedures might be different for each unit, and it asks for patience, thoroughness, and the right set of skills– all in plenty. 

For example, finding the correct manual or the right procedure might not be easily possible, especially when you are strapped for time. These processes require the complete attention and focus of the technician or engineer. 

Now, how does having an intelligent vouce interface sound? What if it is your voice that can be used to request for information? Voice interfaces are ripe to go mainstream with advances in technology. The technician can say “Walk me through the inspection of X machine” to the voice assistant and get a guided workflow. They can get the work done in peace without wondering if they are following the right steps. 

Industry stats indicate that deploying voice interfaces in MRO apps result in a 2X increase in productivity, 50% reduction in unplanned downtime, and a significant 20% increase in revenue stream.

How Voice AI helps the maintenance, repair and operations industry: 

1. Increases productivity:

When maintenance workers engage with handsfree apps, they are capable of accomplishing tasks faster and are presented with an opportunity to multitask. The overall business productivity will increase in leaps and bounds. Moreover, voice enables smoother and faster onboarding and gets the new employee to be productive in a shorter span of time.

2. Allows a wide range of MRO activities:

Voice interfaces have a device-based implementation- it allows workers to be distant and still be able to collect data or listen to guided workflows. It includes laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices that can install and run a mobile application. 

The ability to have a voice interface on these devices, regardless of the connectivity, allows voice enabled applications to fit a wide range of MRO deployments in the field. 

3. Provides detailed troubleshooting:

One more critical advantage of using voice interfaces in the MRO industry is how speech recognition provides detailed error messages. The voice assistant warns when the data being input falls out of ranges that are not acceptable. It can even pre-load information collected in the previous screens and provides detailed instructions for new screens. 

4. Allows for smoother operations:

Voice assistants seamlessly integrate responses within a maintenance or inspection procedure. It is capable of doing this while following the updated guidelines. The technical operator gets additional information during the complicated repair process. Since voice assistants can provide the information in the form of audio, there is no interruption. 

5. Eradicate language barriers:

Some technicians might not be fully versed with the language that the maintenance procedure handbook is written in. It can be a barrier in getting the work done properly. Doing maintenance work in a faulty manner without following the procedures exactly as it is can result in problems. Listening to the instructions via voice can ease the stress of trying to read and make sense and allow for better comprehension.

6. Immediate solutions:

When the operator uses an intelligent voice interface, they can simply ask for any of the information that is already fed in the voice assistant, and the corresponding content will be provided by it. You will get exactly what you asked for. It eliminates the need for manual search, thereby even reducing the time taken for the procedure. 

7. Better training opportunities: 

Apart from providing assistance to service personnel, the voice assistants can also act as a great training tool for new operators. The newly hired operators can learn to operate the machine while listening to audio that can be synchronized with  visual instructions from the voice assistants. 

Wrapping up:

The advantages of using voice assistants in the MRO industry are multiple. The flexibility and capability that voice assistants offer enables greater attention to work, helps focus on the job, and reduces the time that is usually wasted by moving between applications and errors. Give your workers an error free, productive and safer environment with intelligent voice assistants. 

If industrial enterprises are looking for a voice-based solution that will make operations safer and more effective, the Alan Platform is the right solution for you. Check out the Ramco Systems testimonial on their partnership with Alan AI for enterprise MRO software apps.

The team at Alan AI will be more than happy to assist you with any questions or provide a personalized demo of our intelligent voice assistant platform. Just email us at sales@alan.app

Bolstering its enterprise applications with intelligent voice interfaces SUNNYVALE, CA 94582, USA, March 29, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ — 

Alan AI, a Silicon Valley company enabling the next generation of voice interfaces for Enterprise Apps, has announced a strategic partnership with Ramco Systems¹, a leading global cloud enterprise software provider, to embed intelligent voice interfaces for its enterprise offerings. In its initial stages of partnership, the organizations will primarily focus on building business use cases for the Aviation, Aerospace & Defense sector, followed by use cases for other industry verticals.

Ramco Systems offers an integrated and smart platform engineered to develop robust and scalable solutions, thereby offering a competitive edge to its end users. By embedding Alan AI’s voice interface, Ramco’s customers will be able to interact with their applications with natural human language and receive intelligent responses for daily workflows. Features such as accuracy of understanding spoken language, synchronization of voice with existing graphical interfaces, and a hands-free app experience will truly delight the user- from the very first interaction. Voice Assistant will drive smoother app onboarding, higher user engagement and scale adoption and loyalty.

Commenting on the partnership, Ramesh Sivasubramanian, Vice-President – Technology & Innovation, Ramco Systems, said, “Voice recognition is a maturing technology and has been witnessing huge adoption socially, in our day-to-day personal lives. However, its importance in enterprise software has been a real breakthrough and a result of multitudinous innovations. We are excited to enable clients with this voice user interface along with Alan AI, thereby ensuring a futuristic digital enterprise”.

“We are so excited to be able to help support Ramco’s applications and empower their customers with intelligent voice interfaces. Our advanced Voice AI Platform enables enterprises to deploy and manage intelligent and contextual voice interfaces for their Applications in days, not months/ years” said Blake Wheale, Chief Revenue Officer, Alan AI. “This partnership is a great testament of how voice can support a vision of a hands free, productive and safe environment for humans”.
Learn more about Alan AI

#VoiceAssistant #VoiceAI #RamcoSystems #AlanAI

At Alan AI, we care about making all technology easily accessible to everyone and aim to bridge this gap using voice AI. Accessibility is a value we hold in high regard and it starts within our company. We believe building a diverse team is critical in crafting our platform and covering AI ethics blindspots.

Internally, we want to do our part in changing the statistic that today, women hold 25% of jobs in the tech industry while making up half of the entire workforce. Externally, we want to praise those that have been the first to break barriers and encourage future generations that anything is possible.

Here are some of the many incredible women who have or currently are shaping technology.

Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)

Being the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace was a key contributor to the technological revolution. In 1870, Lovelace joined Charles Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine by translating the lecture notes of an Italian engineer. During these nine months of intense analysis, she found many errors in the notes and expanded on them, leading to what is now considered the first ever algorithms that could be used in a computing machine. 

Lovelace didn’t receive the recognition she deserved until a century later when her notes were republished in the 1950s. Following this, the U.S. Department of Defense named a programming language “Ada” in her honor.

Image: Wikipedia

Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992)

Grace Hopper was an American mathematician, teacher, U.S. Navy rear admiral and pioneer in developing computer technology. Her significant work consists of helping in the WWII efforts with the Harvard Mark I computer, inventing the first compiler to translate a programmer’s instructions into computer codes and paving the way for one of the first high-level programming languages, COBOL.

When she was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991, she said “If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years; that’s more important than writing the first compiler.” Hopper is remembered at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.

Image: Computer History Museum

Mary G. Ross (1908 – 2008)

Mary Golda Ross was the first known Native American female engineer. In 1942, she joined the Lockheed Corporation, an American aerospace company, as the first female engineer. She is one of the 40 founding members of the renowned and highly secretive Skunk Works project. Much of her research and writing remains classified, even today.

Mary G. Ross is featured on the US 2019 one dollar coin.

Image: transportationhistory.org

Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924 – )

Evelyn Boyd Granville is one of first African American women to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. After graduating from Yale and struggling to find a job due to race discrimination, she accepted a teaching position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where she taught two African American women who would go on to earn doctorates in mathematics. In 1956, she started working at IBM’s Aviation Space and Information Systems division on various projects for NASA’s Apollo space program, studying rocket trajectories and orbit computations. 

After her years in government work, Granville returned to teaching mathematics of all levels. Today she is retired but is continuously advocating for women’s education in technology. 

Image: undark.org

Annie Easley (1933 – 2011)

Annie J. Easley was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist. After reading an article about twin sisters working as “human computers” at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), she applied for a job the next day. In 1955, she started her 34-year career at NASA (previously known as NACA), doing computations for researchers by hand and then computer programming for important projects like the Centaur high-energy booster rocket and alternative systems to solve energy problems.

Easley also served as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer and was the founder and first President of the NASA Ski Club. 

Image: Salon.com

Radia Perlman (1951 – )

The title of “Mother of the Internet” has been rightfully given to Radia Perlman, a MIT math graduate, computer programmer and network engineer. Her invention of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) was a major contributor to making today’s internet possible. Her most recent work has been on the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning-trees.

She has done keynotes speeches across the world and is currently employed at Dell EMC. When asked about diversity in STEM, Perlman replied, “The kind of diversity that I think really matters isn’t skin shade and body shape, but different ways of thinking.”

Image: eniac.hu

Marissa Mayer (1975 – )

Former Yahoo! CEO and early Google employee, Marissa Mayer is now a co-founder of Sunshine, focusing on artificial intelligence and consumer media.

After completing her studies at Stanford University, Mayer joined Google as the first female engineer at 24 years old. Her contributions during her time there include the design of the Google homepage, Gmail, Chrome, Google Earth, and being one of the three members to develop Google Adwords. From 2012 to 2017, she held the role of president and CEO of Yahoo!. Today, Mayer is working as the co-founder of Sunshine.

Image: Martin Klimek — ZUMA Press/Alamy

Building the future

The future of technology is at the fingertips of today’s students, but the road to their success isn’t always an easy one. Here are three women-founded organizations set up to lift developers of all backgrounds, demographic and skill levels.

Girls Who Code

Working to close the gender gap in technology, Girls Who Code “envisions a world where women are proportionally represented as technical leaders, executives, founders, VCs, board members, and software engineers.” This non-profit organization was founded in 2012 by Reshma Saujani, an American lawyer and politician, who during her run for the US Congress noticed a lack of girls in computer science classrooms while campaigning. With several bestsellers like “Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World” and Ted Talk “Teach girls, bravery not perfection” viewed by thousands and sparking a worldwide conversation, Girls Who Code has today reached 500 million people and 300,000 girls in USA, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom.

Image: Carey Wagner

Black Girls Code

“The great economic equalizer of our generation, the great revolution of this generation, is indeed technology. And by embedding these skills and abilities in our youth today, we can change the nation — one girl, one woman and one generation at a time.”

~ Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code

After her daughter’s disappointing experience at male-dominated computer camp, Kimberly Bryant decided to build an environment that encourages girls, especially from underrepresented communities, to pursue careers in STEM. This led to the creation of Black Girls Code, a non-profit organization that provides African American youth with programming skills through community outreach programs such as workshops and after school programs. Since 2011, BGC has served over 200,000 students and has the ultimate goal of teaching 1 million girls how to code by 2040.

Image: Black Girls Code

CodeNewbie

Starting as a weekly Twitter Chat to connect people that are learning to code by fellow coder Saron Yitbarek, CodeNewbie has since grown into a supportive, international online community of people learning and supporting one another’s coding journey with weekly Twitter Chats every Wednesday at 9PM EST. 

Saron Yitbarek also hosts several podcasts like CodeNewbie involving stories and interviews about new developers transitioning into tech careers and joining developer communities.

Image: freecodecamp.org

Happy International Women’s Day!

Inspired by the women you see here? Get started with Alan AI and build your own AI powered voice interface today.

We are transitioning into a world where our digital experiences will be shaped with the help of voice. Marketers should find ways to come up with voice interfaces at various touchpoints in a mobile application or website. 35% of US adults own a smart speaker, up from zero at the beginning of 2015. 

The fast-paced voice adoption is a huge opportunity for marketers. Making users choose voice isn’t a big deal as most of them carry smart phones equipped with a microphone. All that they need to do is extend the current features to a voice app. 

How Can Voice Apps Scale App Adoption and Customer Loyalty?

1. Understands their Intent

43% users aged between 16 and 64 use voice search and voice commands extensively. Voice apps have already processed millions of real-world conversations, and have a deep understanding of natural language. Customers can speak naturally and freely. Advanced Voice interfaces will be able to understand a wide range of natural speech nuances, understand their internet and save time. Triggering the wrong intent will give out wrong information to customers. Internet trends report says that internet voice searches were mostly done using natural conversational language. Voice AI should be designed in such a way that it will understand the natural conversational flow. 

2. Creates Greater Empathy:

When customers connect with a brand on a deeper level, they feel understood, and that helps with building a connection. Through voice, brands can come across as relatable, empathetic, and honest. The pitch and tonality combine to become the brand’s voice. A recent study by Apple says that voice assistants which mimic the conversational style of humans are considered more likable and trustworthy. 

Brands need to invest in creating voice interfaces which reflect the unique aspects of their customers. Communication these days has become even more personalized through Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Here, deep knowledge of the prospective customer is formed through data and analytics, your voice AI can be designed to reflect the data. 

3. Creates Authentic Experiences:

Voice interfaces should be designed to reflect the values and mission of the company. It will make the users feel as if you are being authentic with them. Provide truly conversational voice experiences to your users, we are not referring to bot interactions. 

Your users should forget that they are talking to an AI machine, and believe that they are interacting with the most helpful sales rep in your team. It will help foster a relationship for which the customers will keep coming back. 

4. Proactively Provides Customer-Centric Updates

Communicating with customers at the right time is important. For example, the addition of a new favorite item on a restaurant menu or the new dress line available in the style preferred by the customer. Also, calls to confirm deliveries and order status updates translates into happy customers who will want to stay with you. 

5. Simplifies Onboarding Process

Onboarding a new customer is the first opportunity for a brand to delight them. It is imperative that you provide a smooth onboarding process. The more difficult it is to use an app, the higher are the chances that they will abandon ship.

One of the most effective ways to simplify user onboarding is to reduce the innumerable steps that are necessary to create user accounts. Voice interfaces can solve this by making the customer register with their voice. Every time they try to log in, all they need to do is use their voice. 

The Wrap

Personalized Voice Interfaces which interact with your customers like normal conversations will be able to increase customer adoption and loyalty. To increase customer and scale app adoption with the help of voice requires work. Your voice engine’s user interface should be conversational, responsive, and offer frictionless experiences. It should also be capable of providing fast and accurate responses. 

If you are looking for a voice-based solution to increase customer loyalty and app adoption, the team at Alan AI will be able to deliver exactly that. 

Write to us at sales@alan.app

Technologies make our society resilient in the face of a Black Swan event like the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of these technologies might even have a long-lasting impact beyond Covid-19. A technology that is of huge benefit during this time of chaos and uncertainty is that of voice enabled apps. According to the Adobe Voice Survey, a majority of the users found that voice interfaces made their lives faster, easier, and more convenient. 77% of the respondents in the survey said that they were planning to increase their usage of voice technology in the next 12 months. 

Thanks to voice AI’s ability to understand natural language, its adoption will keep increasing and there will be more use cases added to its repertoire. Voice user interfaces are great for companies in certain industries: finance, education, healthcare, technology and more. 

Voice Technology Creates Safer Alternatives in Times of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to be wary of touching anything in a public place for the fear of contracting (and spreading) the virus, as new variants like Omicron emerge. AI-powered voice technology has enabled a contactless ecosystem by providing safer alternatives to get things done. Booking a medical appointment or checking one’s bank balance might not have been activities that consumers would have used voice technology for earlier, but that is fast changing. 

INtelligent voice interfaces provide frictionless, contactless, responsive and predictive interactions. It changes the way we access information and how we navigate between the physical and digital worlds. According to a study by Juniper Research, 52% of voice interface users said that they used them a number of times a day or nearly every day, in 2021. You can imagine that the numbers will only keep increasing. 

In mobile applications, voice AI reduces the complexity of navigation, increases conversion, offers greater convenience, and boosts engagement. 

Voice AI has Enabled a Contactless Paradigm

Voice enabled apps have emerged to the forefront during the pandemic in many instances, for example,

•  A significant drop in cash payments. Voice and touch and type apps are leading the way for payment for goods and services.
• In Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), voice-enabled kiosks offer hands-free ordering. 
• The hospitality industry uses voice-enabled kiosks for not only checking-in and checking-out customers, but also to control in-room amenities for the guests.
• Voice shopping makes advanced filtering easy as customers don’t have to navigate through complicated menus. It is expected to reach $40 billion this year. 
• From virtual health guides to real-time medication reminders, voice AI has multiple use cases in healthcare.
• In the education sector, voice AI can be used in conducting online viva exams, authenticate access to learning materials, act as smart campus assistants, and so on.   

The pandemic has influenced a shift in the mindset and habits of consumers. They have been forced to adopt technology that promotes contactless experiences — to mitigate chances of getting infected from touching surfaces. To survive and thrive beyond the pandemic, brands should enable voice-based technologies to latch on to new consumer behavior and provide a superior user experience.

Wrapping Up

Consumers are using voice technology more than ever in the pandemic,  and expect it to be a standard for all digital experiences. Voice is infinitely easier to use and advancements in voice technology gives quick, accurate results. With the massive societal and economic shifts that have occurred because of the pandemic, our lives, both personal and professional, will continue on the path of tectonic changes – and voice AI is going to be a huge part of it. 

If you are looking to include AI-powered voice apps to your business, get in touch with the team at Alan AI. The Alan Platform can help you create voice enabled apps in a matter of days. 

Write to them at sales@alan.app. 

Jane Dove: “Hey Alan,  transfer $250 to Mark Smith?”

With this simple voice command, Mark’s bank account gets credited with money. 

If you are surprised, here’s a warm welcome to the world of voice technology in banking. Artificial Intelligence Voice Interfaces provide a much faster way to complete tasks in financial institutions and is a boon for customer support, account management, user authentication, and more.

The simple reason why voice tech is changing the business world of finance is that it is simple to use, and highly efficient. The number of digital voice interfaces in the world will be 8.4 billions- that’s more than the world’s population!  

Neobanking or pure-play digital banks is an emerging trend and the struggle is to bring  the friendly, personal  service of physical retail bank offices to digital fronts – websites and mobile apps. Traditional banks  have to reduce their operating costs to compete in the neobanking sectors. Intelligent Voice Interfaces will be a tremendous asset here.

 Voice Technology in the Banking industry:

Many mobile banking apps have 100s of features exposed to their customers via app screens. One voice button will give them access to all the features and set the stage for infinite functionality with voice. That’s reason enough for them to bank on voice interfaces.

 Wealth Management

A voice interface can interact with the portfolio customers in a humanized fashion about the latest options available to them, offer personalized research on markets, and even perform tasks like booking a meeting with their portfolio manager. Banks can easily pair voice interfaces with its investment portfolio management software so that users can ask questions and get informed, intelligent  responses. 

 Account Servicing

Customers can use voice commands to check their account balance, transaction history, account activity, card services, request for cheque book, etc. The voice technology provides a seamless onboarding experience to a new customer with electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC). The context-based query resolution capability of the voice technology provides a superior customer experience. 

Loan Disbursal

Voice tech can even help determine the customer’s eligibility for a loan and enable a smooth disbursal- this fast tracks the otherwise slow process that can be frustrating for the customers. 

It can also educate the customer on the different loan schemes available and provide real-time updates on any changes. 

Collections

One of the most interesting use cases of voice tech in the financial industry is in the collections department. The collections department has a loathsome reputation, but the voice interface does a great job as it has the ability to handle such interactions with the right mix of empathy and assertiveness.

In conclusion, every bank has to improve it’s Customer Experience on the digital fronts as their world is embracing self-service, customer centric banking.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your fintech application that will work with your app’s existing UI and can be deployed in a matter of days, the Alan Platform is the right solution for you. 

The team at Alan AI will be more than happy to assist you. Just email us at sales@alan.app

Imagine being able to order your favorite dish from your favorite restaurant with the help of voice commands when you are taking a drive in your sedan. How wonderful would that be! The entire experience would be hands-free, hassle-free, and it will get completed in a jiffy.

Today, there are a number of applications which leverage voice technology. According to Capgemini Research Institute, the use of voice assistants will grow to 31 percent of US adults by 2022.

In this article, we are going to discuss the usage of voice technology in food ordering and delivery.

Will customers be eager to order from restaurants using an intelligent voice interface?

A heartening statistic that shows how customers are open to using voice for ordering food- according to a research by Progressive Business Insights, 64% of Americans are interested in ordering food with the help of voice assistants.

With the help of intelligent voice interfaces, what was once a four to five minute exercise (often with some fumbling back and forth between screens and menus), gets completed in a few moments. The demand for a contact-less, fast and accessible food ordering option is gaining more momentum, thanks to the pandemic. COVID has ushered in a wave of digital tools, including voice technology, which makes efficient, touchless, and accurate food ordering a possibility.

The restaurant industry is quite adept at understanding what customers’ want. We will soon see most of them leveraging the full spectrum of voice technology in food ordering and delivery.

The User Experience:

Personalized, humanized voice interactions

An intelligent voice interface for food ordering will be a joy to the user. Just by uttering a few words, the in-app voice assistant is capable of ordering the right menu items including special requests, for example,

“ Can I get the regular veggie sandwich”?

“ And can you please omit the onions”

It can also pull up past favorites and allow the user to quickly reorder dishes, suggest similar dishes based on customer’s preferences or dietary restrictions, communicate ‘Specials of the Day’, and gather feedback from the user on any menu improvements- all in a smooth, interactive manner.

The Restaurateur Experience:

Works with the existing user interface

The voice technology is not a separate app where your customers will be redirected to place the orders. It works seamlessly with the existing app interface of the restaurant and the voice command will be reflected in the app visually, so that the customer knows exactly what’s happening. Moreover, multimodal assistants allow voice in combination with touch and type, giving the customer ample freedom of choice.

Accurate ordering

Incorrectly inputting information or hearing the wrong words can result in errors that will botch up the food orders. It will also result in customer complaints, and such a hit on one’s reputation is very bad news for restaurants. Voice tech that is accurate strives to eliminate manual tasks and reduce errors in ordering food.

Reduction in operational costs

One of the biggest contributors to the expenses of a restaurant business are its overheads. From paying the staff to managing inventories, an issue here or there could lead to a lot of resources wasted. COVID has hit the restaurant industry hard as is highlighted in the article Forbes: Restaurant industry is fighting to stay alive and avenues to reduce costs will be welcomed by restaurant owners.

When voice enabled apps handle the job of taking orders, restaurants can cut costs and only hire the services of experienced staff who will take care of preparing the food. Also, restaurants won’t have to train employees to take orders nor have to invest in systems which do that.

Easy Upsell

As per an article in Forbes, The average ticket size increased by 20–40% when voice enabled apps were used to place a food order. This increase in the size of the order can be attributed to upselling, since the voice interface technology recommends more products based on the past history and customer’s preferences.

Coherent Brand Experience

Using the brand elements at all places consistently is something that every marketer believes in, and for the right reasons. Voice technology is capable of adding a restaurant’s brand elements into the ordering system into every interaction. By doing so, the customer will get the same consistent experience while ordering food from the restaurant’s app. The voice of the voice tech can also be tailored to reflect the personality of your restaurant.

In summary, the restaurant industry has jumped into the voice technology bandwagon as it comes with a host of conveniences for both consumers and restaurateurs. By combining traditional delivery systems with modern voice assistant technology, superior service delivery becomes a cakewalk. It is very likely that voice command-driven food ordering and delivery will become the norm, thanks to its ease and speed.

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for food ordering and delivery that will work with your app’s existing UI and can be deployed in a matter of days, the Alan Platform is the right solution for you.

The team at Alan AI will be more than happy to assist you. Just email us at sales@alan.app

Is Voice technology a boon to the healthcare patient community? Their growing adoption attests to their value and destiny to become an essential and reliable piece of the healthcare ecosystem. The global market for healthcare virtual assistant is expected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2021 to $6.0 billion by 2026 (Source: Global Voice Assistant Market by Market and Research, 2019 ). Microsoft’s $19.7 billion deal announcement in April 2021 to acquire speech-to-text software company Nuance Communications, proves that this is a red-hot technology sector.

The US population is aging, and long-term and assisted living is on an upward spiral. While aging is not by itself a disease, the elderly often need special care and assistance to maintain optimal health. Many of them living at home are expected to use technology aids, such as health apps on their phone, in addition to receiving assistance from caregivers, either family, friends, or professionals. Imagine how difficult or impossible it is for an aged person to work with complex screens in apps and access the information they are looking for. 

Chronic disease needs constant vigilance by the healthcare provider. Stats in US healthcare spending reveal that 80% is spent on chronic disease management like cancer, alzheimers, dementia, diabetes, and osteoporosis, versus 20% for other care. These patients have to take daily medication, check their disease state at defined intervals during the day, perform recommended exercises, set up regular doctor appointments, and more. Remote monitoring of chronic disease patients is now a reality as technology can transmit patient data wirelessly from the patient’s home into the offices of their physician. But, these remote systems are often connected to a home device with a companion app that monitors and collects the patient’s health data. These patient-facing apps often have multiple screens and features that require time and effort to onboard, use, and keep up with. It’s not surprising that patients easily get frustrated and abandon use of these applications or call the doctor’s office frequently with questions.

Adding to the above scenario, US physicians and healthcare workers are strained and often pushed to the limit in caring for the patient population. With the current ratio of 2.34 doctors per 1,000 people, it is often impossible for a doctor or assistant to respond to general patient questions in a timely fashion.

Enter the empathetic voice interface. With voice interfaces, the elderly and patients can now speak to the device for tasks such as- booking medical appointments, searching for any data on their condition, relaying information to their doctor- and more. And the app can converse with them in a natural way on topics such as “How are you feeling today?’ or ‘Did you take your medication at 2 PM?” and record the responses. Voice assistants empower a patient as he or she can progress in their self-care and management of their health. Additionally, the healthcare provider’s time is freed up as the voice assistant can provide quick, accurate responses to general patient queries.

What about the caregiver? Caregivers can also benefit from an empathetic voice assistant as they are always seeking ways to better care for their sick, aging, or chronic disease patients. In the digital age, caregivers are using apps such as AARP Caregiving that allows patient symptom monitoring, tracking medication intake and appointments, coordinating care with others, and a help center for questions. Wouldn’t it help to have a voice attached to these caregiving apps, an intelligent one that can provide a hands free, contactless experience? It will surely make life a bit easier for the strained caregiver.    

Voiceinterfaces come in many guises, but they all provide the patient with a conversational experience. The Alan AI platform is an advanced,  complete in-app voice assistant platform that works with the existing UI of any healthcare app and adds a visual, contextual experience. Moreover, it can be deployed in simply a matter of days. 

For further information, contact sales@alan.app.

Jane Dove: “Can you transfer $250 to Mark Smith?”

With this simple voice command, Mark’s bank account gets credited with money. 

If you are surprised, here’s a warm welcome to the world of voice assistant technology in banking. 

The simple reason why voice tech is changing the business world is that it is simple to use, and highly efficient. It is expected that by 2024 (Source:Statistica) the number of digital voice assistants in the world will be 8.4 billions- that’s more than the world’s population!

The financial sector has embraced the voice assistant technology with arms-wide-open as it rife with use cases, from biometric authentication to voice driven transactions. Voice provides a much faster way to complete tasks and is a huge help in customer support, account management, user authentication, and more. 

If you think voice-assistant technology is new to the financial scene, you are mistaken. Bank of America’s (BofA) voice-assistant software named Erika has answered more than 250 million questions since its launch in 2018. From getting notified about duplicate charges to receiving bill reminders for scheduled payments, it does a lot. 

There are many more financial institutions which either have their own voice bots or leverage the technology to consumer applications. But, there is a breadth of financial applications that remain untapped by Voice Technology that can immensely benefit from the ease and convenience of ‘Just Ask Your App’.

In this article, we are going to look at the impact voice assistant technology has created in the financial industry. 

Few Challenges in the Financial Industry Resolved by Voice Assistants

• Decrease in customer loyalty thanks to a lot of new players in the market
• Lengthy waiting times to find resolution for any issue
• Laborious customer identification process tests their patience 
• Heavy load on call centers who have to respond to even the simplest of queries

Use Cases of Voice Assistant Technology in the Banking industry:

1. Voice-Enabled Payments:

Customers can use the bank’s mobile app through voice commands. It is not necessarily a one-way communication, as the voice assistant can also inform the customer about the latest promotions and offers, if any. 

With more banks embracing voice-based technologies, the adoption among customers will also grow. Voice payments is immensely popular because of the speed and seamlessness that it offers. Some of the biggest names such as NCR Corporation, Amazon, PayPal, Paysafe, PCI Pal, Vibepay are in the voice-enabled payments space. 

You can expect more players entering into the market to make it even more mainstream than it is now. More than 31% of US adults will use voice payments by 2022, says Business Insider. 

2. Voice-Biometrics Authentication:

Client identification through digital channels can be accomplished in the following ways with voice biometrics:

• Ask for a password or a PIN
• Ask for an OTP or a code
• Follow up questions and responses

Voice biometrics is considered one of the most effective authentication systems as the voice of the customer can not only be used to log them in, but also allow them to go for higher transactions.

The voice of the customer can also be checked against a voice sample. Security is of utmost importance in the finance sector and voice biometrics is highly-effective in restricting a fraud user to gain access to a user’s account details and other critical information. 81% of hacks leverage weak or stolen passwords, voice authentication lowers the chance of fraud. 

   3. Wealth Management: 

Banks can pair voice assistants with its investment portfolio management software. Users can ask questions about their wealth portfolio and how they can optimize their ROI based on their risk capacity. Voice assistants can provide them with a spectrum of financial research with personalized data. This could help the customer immensely in making informed investment decisions. 

    4. Account Servicing:

Allowing customers to use voice commands to check their account balance, transaction history, account activity, card services, request for cheque book, etc. The voice assistant technology provides a seamless onboarding experience to a new customer with electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC). The context-based query resolution capability of the voice technology provides a superior customer experience. 

5. Loan Disbursal:

A voice assistant can even help determine the customer’s eligibility for a loan, enable a smooth disbursal, and even keep track of the EMIs- this fastracks the otherwise slow process that can be frustrating for the customers. The customer can also get information about the different loan schemes available. 

One of the most interesting use cases of voice assistant tech in the financial industry is in the collections department. The collections department has a loathsome reputation, but the voice assistant does a great job as it has the ability to handle such interactions with the right mix of empathy and assertiveness.

In conclusion, Voice Assistant technology has achieved incredible gains in the past few months and its adoption is only going to increase with time. 

Will a suite of banking services that you can possibly imagine be brought under the ambit of voice assistant technology? Only time will tell. But, we can certainly be sure that the use cases will increase, and nudge business and consumer interactions to Voice interfaces in the financial world. 

If you are looking for a voice-based solution for your fintech application that will work with your app’s existing UI, the Alan Platform is the right solution for you.

The team at Alan AI will be more than happy to assist you. Just email us at sales@alan.app

As product manager, your job is to constantly look for ways to improve your application, delight your customers, and resolve pain points. And in this regard, voice interfaces provide a unique opportunity to secure and expand your app’s position in the market where you compete.

Voice assistants are not new. Siri is now ten years old. But the voice interface market is nearing a turning point, where advances in artificial intelligence and mobile computing are making them a ubiquitous part of every user’s computing experience.

By giving multimodal interfaces to applications, voice assistants bring the user experience closer to human interactions. They also provide app developers with the opportunity to provide infinite functionality, an especially important factor for small-screen mobile devices and wearables. And from a product management perspective, voice interfaces enable product teams to iterate fast and add new features at a very fast pace.

However, not all voice interfaces are made equal. The first generation of voice interfaces, which made their debut on mobile operating systems and smart speakers, are limited in the scope of benefits they can bring to applications. Absence of cross-platform support, privacy concerns, and lack of contextual awareness make it very difficult to integrate these voice platforms into applications. Otherwise put, they have been created to serve the needs of their vendors, not app developers. 

Meeting these challenges is the vision behind the Alan Platform, an intelligent voice interface that has been created from ground up with product integration in mind. The Alan Platform provides superior natural language processing capabilities thanks to deep integration with your application, which enables it to draw contextual insights from various sources, including voice, interactions with application interface, and business workflows. 

Alan Platform works across all web and mobile operating systems and is easy to integrate with your application, requiring minimal changes to the backend and frontend. Your team doesn’t need to have any experience in machine learning or technical knowledge of AI to integrate the Alan Platform and use it in your application.

The Alan Platform is also a privacy- and security-friendly voice assistant. Every Alan customer gets an independent instance of the Alan Server, where they have exclusive ownership of their data. There is no third-party access to the data, and the server instance lives in a secure cloud that complies with all major enterprise-grade data protection standards.

Finally, Alan AI has been designed for super-fast iteration and infinite functionality support. The Alan Platform comes with a rich analytics tool that enables you to have fine-grained, real-time visibility into how users interact with your voice interface and graphical elements, and how they respond to changes in your application. Alan’s voice is a great source for finding current pain-points, testing hypotheses, and drawing inspiration for new ideas to improve your application.

Please send a note to sales@alan.app to get access to the white paper on “why voice should be part of your 2022 digital roadmap” and find out what the Alan Platform can do for you and how our customers are using it to transform the user experience of their applications.

To be entered into the competition, click on the link here to register. In the meantime, here are some video we’ve created for you to check out:

• Alan AI Overview
• How to Build a Voice Assistant

Hope you enter the competition. Best of luck!

In the meantime, please check out this course we designed for you. If you send in a submission of your project, let us know and we’ll provide a free code for the course.

If you would like to learn more about Alan AI in general or have any questions, please feel free to book a meeting with one of our Customer Success team members here.

Click here to download your free white-paper on how privacy and security should be handled with Voice UX.

Cyber security is a table stakes for any successful app, but how does this translate to new Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technologies, like Voice UX? 

No company refuses being on the cutting edge of technology, but undiscovered vulnerabilities pose a large threat that drives most wannabe innovative decision makers into forgoing the newest tech. Fortunately, this is not a showstopper for forward-thinking products like Alan AI. We’ve formulated a framework on how we protect our users’ privacy through our data collection, processing and storing standard procedures.

Read our whitepaper, Privacy & Security for Smart Apps on the Alan Platform, to learn how smart apps can best protect their users.

Chatbots and voice assistants weren’t created with marketers first in mind. Both are task-oriented products at their cores, serving users when actual human beings can’t, which is quite often. So it should come as no surprise that both support an estimated 5 billion global users combined.

And now marketers are showing up in droves. 

Rise of Chatbot Marketing

Online stores turned to chatbots to fight cart abandonment. Their automated service around-the-clock provided a safety net late into user journeys. Unlike traditional channels broadcasting one-way messages, chatbots (like Drift and Qualified) fostered two-way interactions between websites and users. Granting consumers a voice boosted engagement. As it turned out, messaging a robot became much more popular than calling customer service.

Successful marketing chatbots rely on three things: 1) Scope, 2) Alignment, and 3) KPIs. 

Conversational A.I. needs to get specific. Defining a chatbot’s scope — or how well it solves a finite number of problems — makes or breaks its marketing potential. A chief marketing officer (CMO) at a B2C retail brand probably would not benefit from a B2B chatbot that displays SaaS terminology in its UX. Spotting mutual areas of expertise is quite simple. The hard part requires evaluating how well the chatbot aligns with the strategies you and your team deploy. If there is synergy between conversational A.I. and a marketer, then they must choose KPIs that best measure the successes and failures yet to come. Some of the most common include the amounts of active users, sessions per user, and bot sessions initiated.

Chatbots vs. Voice Assistants

Chatbots and voice assistants have a few things in common. Both are constantly learning more about their respective users, relying on newer data to improve the quality of interactions. And both use automation to communicate instantly and make the user experience (UX) convenient.

Chatbots carry out fewer tasks repetitively. Despite their extensive experience, they require a bit more supervision. Voice assistants, meanwhile, oversee entire user journeys. If needed, they can solve problems independently with a more versatile skill set. 

Voice assistants are just getting started when it comes to marketing. Upon taking the global market by storm for the last decade, there is still room for voice products to reach new customers. But the B2B space presents a larger addressable market. The same way voice assistants gained traction rather quickly with millions of users is how they may pop up across organizations. 

Rise of Voice Assistant Marketing

Many marketers considered voice a “low priority” back in 2018. Lately, the tides have changed: 28 percent of marketers in a Voicebot.ai survey find voice assistants “extremely important.” Why? Because they enjoy immediate access to a mass audience. Once voice products earn more public trust, they can leverage bubbling user relationships to introduce products and services. 

Voice assistants are stepping beyond their usual duties and tapping into their marketing powers. Amazon Alexa enables brands to develop product skills that alleviate user and customer pains. Retail rival Wal-Mart launched Walmart Stories, an Alexa skill showcasing customer and employee satisfaction initiatives. 

Amazon created a dashboard to gauge individual Alexa skill performance in 2017. For example, marketers can see how many unique customers, plays, sessions, and utterances a skill has. Multiple metrics can be further broken down by type of user action, thus indicating which moments are best suited for engagement.

Google Assistant also amplifies brands through an “Actions” feature similar to Alexa’s skills. TD Ameritrade launched an action letting users view their financial portfolios via voice command. 

The Bottom Line

Chatbots aren’t going anywhere. According to GlobeNewswire, they form a $2.9B market predicted to be worth $10.5B in 2026. Automation’s strong tailwinds almost guarantee chatbots won’t face extinction anytime soon. They are likely staying in their lane, building upon their current capabilities instead of adding drastically different ones. 
Meanwhile, voice e-commerce will become a $40B business by 2022. Over 4 billion voice assistants are in use worldwide. By 2024, that number will surpass 8 billion. It’s hard to bet against voice assistants dominating this decade’s MarTech landscape. Their future ubiquity, easy access to hands-free searches, and the increased likelihood A.I. improves its effectiveness will leave plenty of room for growth. If future voice products address recurring user pains, they will innovate with improved personalization and privacy features. 

If you’re looking for a voice platform to bring your application, get started with the Alan AI platform today.

References

1. The Future is Now – 37 Fascinating Chatbot Statistics (smallbizgenius)
2. 2020’s Voice Search Statistics – Is Voice Search Growing? (Review 42)
3. 10 Ways to Measure Chatbot Program Success (CMSWire)
4. Virtual assistants vs Chatbots: What’s the Difference & How to Choose the Right One? (FreshDesk) 
5. Digiday Research: Voice is a low priority for marketers (Digiday)
6. Marketers Assign Higher Importance to Voice Assistants as a Marketing Channel in 2021 – New Report (Voicebot.ai)
7. Use Alexa Skill Metrics Dashboard to Improve Smart Home and Flash Briefing Skill Engagement (Amazon.com)
8. The global Chatbot market size to grow from USD 2.9 billion in 2020 to USD 10.5 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.5% (GlobeNewsWire)
9. Chatbot Market by Component, Type, Application, Channel Integration, Business Function, Vertical And Region – Global Forecast to 2026 (Report Linker)
10. Voice Shopping Set to Jump to $40 Billion By 2022, Rising From $2 Billion Today (Compare Hare)
11. Number of digital voice assistants in use worldwide 2019-2024 (Statista)
12. The Future of Voice Technology (OTO Systems, Inc.)

After a decade of taking the commercial market by storm, it’s official: voice technology is no longer the loudest secret in Silicon Valley. The speech and voice recognition market is currently worth over $10 billion. By 2025, it is projected to surpass $30 billion. No longer is it monumental or unconventional to simply speak to a robot not named WALL-E and hold basic conversations. Voice products already oversee our personal tech ecosystems at home while organizing our daily lives. And they bring similar skill sets to enterprises in hopes of optimizing project management efforts. 

The future arrived a long time ago. Problems at work and in life are now more complex. Settling for linear solutions will not suffice. So how do we know what separates a high-quality modern voice user experience (UX) from the rest? 

Navigating an ever-changing voice technology landscape does not require a fancy manual or a DeLorean (although we at Alan proudly believe DeLoreans are pretty cool). A basic understanding of which qualities make the biggest difference on a modern voice product’s UX can catch us up to warp speed and help anyone better understand this market. Here are four features each user experience must have to create win-win scenarios for users and developers. 

• Multiple Contexts
• Workflow Capabilities
• Seamless Integration
• Privacy

MULTIPLE CONTEXTS

Pitfalls in communication between people and voice technology exist because limited insights were available until a decade ago. For instance, voice assistants were forced to play a guessing game upon finally rolling out to market and predict user behavior in their first-ever interactions. They lacked experience engaging back and forth with human beings. Even when we communicate verbally, we still rely on subtle cues to shape how we say what we mean. Without any prior context, voice products struggled to grasp the world around us. 

By gathering Visual, Dialog, and Workflow contexts, it becomes easier to understand user intent, respond to inquiries, and engage in multi-stage conversations. Visual contexts are developed to spark nonverbal communication through physical tools like screens. This does not include scenarios where a voice product collects data from a disengaged user. Dialog contexts process long conversations requiring a more advanced understanding. And Workflow contexts improve accuracy for predictions made by data models. Overall, user dialogue can be understood by voice products more often. 

When two or more contexts work together, they are more likely to help support multiple user interfaces. Multimodal UX unites two or more interfaces into a voice product’s UX. Rather than take a one-track-minded approach and place all bets on a single UX that may fail alone, this strategy aims to maximize user engagement. Together, different interfaces — such as a visual and voice — can flex their best qualities while covering each of their weaknesses. In turn, more human senses are interacted with. Product accessibility and functionality improve vastly. And higher-quality product-user relationships are produced. 

WORKFLOW CAPABILITIES

Developers want to design a convenient and accurate voice UX. This is why using multiple workflows matters — it empowers voice technology to keep up with faster conversations. In turn, optimizing personalization feels less like a chore. The more user scenarios a voice product is prepared to resolve quickly, the better chance it has to cater to a diverse set of user needs across large markets. 

There is no single workflow matrix that works best for every UX. Typically, voice assistants combine two types: task-oriented and knowledge-oriented. Task-oriented workflows complete almost anything a user asks their device to do, such as setting alarms. Knowledge-oriented workflows lean on secondary sources like the internet to complete a task, such as searching for a question about Mt. Everest’s height.

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION

Hard work that goes into product development can be wasted if the experience curated cannot be shared with the world. This mantra applies to the notion of developing realistic contexts and refining workflows without ensuring the voice product will seamlessly integrate. While app integrations can result in system dependencies, having an API connect the dots between a wide variety of systems saves stress, time, and money during development and on future projects. Doing so allows for speedier and more interactive builds to bring cutting-edge voice UX to life. 

PRIVACY 

Voice tech has notoriously failed to respect user privacy — especially when products have collected too much data at unnecessary times. One Adobe survey reported 81% of users were concerned about their privacy when relying on voice recognition tools. Since there is little to no trust, an underlying paranoia defines these negative user experiences far too often.

Enterprises often believe their platforms are designed well-enough to side-step past these user sentiments. Forward-thinking approaches to user privacy must promote transparency on matters regarding who owns user data, where that data is accessible, whether it is encrypted, and for how long. A good UX platform will take care of computer infrastructure and provide each customer with separate containers and their own customized AI model.

If you’re looking for a voice platform to bring your application, get started with the Alan AI platform today.

It’s no secret voice tech performs everyday magic for users. By now, basic voice product capabilities and features are well-known to the public. Common knowledge is enough to tell us what this technology does. Yet we fail to consider what factors and mechanisms behind the scenes enable these products to work. Multiple frameworks oversee different methods that people and products communicate with. But as a concept, the frequent lifeblood of the user experience — Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) — is quite concrete.  

As the name hints, SLU takes what someone tells a voice product and tries to understand it. Doing so involves detecting signs in speech, coding inferences correctly, and navigating complexities as an intermediary between human voices and scripts featuring calligraphy. Since typed and spoken language form sentences differently, self-corrections and hesitations recur. SLUs leverage different tools to navigate user messages through traffic. 

The most established is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), a technology that transcribes user speech at the system’s front end. By tracking audio signals, spoken words convert to text. Similar to the first listener in an elementary school game of telephone, ASR is most likely to precisely understand what the original caller whispered. Conversely, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) determines user intent at the back end. Both ASR and NLU are used in tandem since they typically complement each other well. Meanwhile, an End-to-End SLU cuts corners by deciphering utterances without transcripts. 

This Law & Order: SLU series gets juicier once you know all that Spoken Language Understanding is up against. One big challenge SLU systems face is the fact ASR has a complicated past. The number of transcription errors ASRs have committed is borderline criminal — not in a court of law — but the product repairs and false starts that resulted left a polarizing effect on users. ASRs usually operate at than the speed of sound or slower. And the icing on the cake? The limited scope of domain knowledge across early SLU systems hampered their appeal across targeted audiences. Relating to different niches was difficult as jargon was scarce. 

Let’s say you are planning a vacation. After deciding your destination will be New York, you are ready to book a flight. You tell your voice assistant, “I want to fly from San Francisco to New York.” 

That request is sliced and diced into three pieces: Domain, Intent, and Slot Labels. 

1. DOMAIN (“Flight”)

Before accurately determining what a user said, SLU systems figure out what subject they talked about. A domain is the predetermined area of expertise that a program specializes in. Since many voice products are designed to appeal broadly, learning algorithms can classify various query subjects by categorizing incoming user data. In the example above, the domain is just “Flight.” No hotels were mentioned. Nor did the user ask to book a cruise. They simply preferred to fly to the Big Apple.    

Domain classification is a double-edged sword SLU must use wisely. Without it, these systems can miss the mark, steering someone in need of one application into another. 

The SLU has to guess if the user referred to flights or not. Otherwise, the system could produce the wrong list of travel options. Nobody should prompt the user to accidentally book a rental car for a cross-country road trip they never wanted. 

2. INTENT (“Departure”)

Tracking down the subject a speaker talks about matters. However, if a voice product cannot pin down why that person spoke, how could it solve their problem? Carrying out a task would then become unnecessary. 

Once the domain is selected, the SLU identifies user intent. Doing so goes one step further and traces why that person communicated with the system. In the example above, “Departure” is the intent. When someone asks about flying, the SLU has enough information to believe the user is likely interested in leaving town. 

3. SLOT LABELS (Departure: “San Francisco”, Arrival: “New York”)

Enabling an SLU system to set domains and grasp intent is often not enough. Sure, we already know the user is vouching to leave on a flight. But the system is yet to officially document where they want to go.   

Slots capture the specifics of a query once the subject matter and end goal are both determined. Unlike their high-stakes Vegas counterparts, these slots do not rack up casino winnings. Instead, they take the domain and intent and apply labels to them. Within the same example, departure and arrival locations must be accounted for. The original query includes both: “San Francisco” (departure) and “New York” (arrival). 

IMPACT

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) provides a structure that establishes, stores, and processes nomenclature that allows voice products to find their identity. When taking the needed leap to classify and categorize queries, SLU systems collect better data and personalize voice experiences. Products then become smarter and channel more empathy. And they are empowered to anticipate user needs and solve problems quickly. Therefore, SLU facilitates efficient workflow design and raises the ceiling on how well people can share and receive information to accomplish more.

If you’re looking for a voice platform to bring your application, get started with the Alan AI platform today.

Living in a smart house used to only exist in sci-fi movies. Fast forward to today and connected homes and smart gadgets are quickly becoming the norm. Smart home tech has transformed every aspect of home life, from security and basic kitchen tasks to how a house is built. It’s making our lives more comfortable, economical, convenient, and safe.

If you haven’t upgraded your home with the latest tech there are many ways to start. If your needs are relatively simple, there are affordable options that can bring about convenience, however, if you want to go all out you can create a fully connected and modern space. So, check out the latest top smart home tech products that you can add to your home today.

Voice Technology

Voice assistants

“Hey Alan, play my workout playlist.” While voice assistants have been around since the early 2010s, it has taken us a while to get comfortable talking to applications and devices. Today’s most popular commands include asking voice assistants to play music, answer a question, turn on the lights, provide the weather, and set reminders, alarms, and timers. As artificial intelligence (AI) advances, virtual assistants will become more personalized towards individuals. New features such as voice detection can recognize who is talking and create a unique, tailored experience, like calling you by a nickname or providing music recommendations that fit your style. 

Home Security

Video doorbells, cameras, and alarm systems

We have all heard stories about porch pirates stealing packages. One of the biggest smart home tech trends is investing in video doorbells, security cameras, and alarm systems. Grouped together, a standardized smart home security system may be one of the best investments you can make to protect your family and your home. Video doorbells and home security cameras now have live views and voice capabilities that allow users to see and speak to people at the door from virtually anywhere. Motion sensors can detect and record activity that can trigger an alarm, phone notification, and alert authorities. Installing these can provide that added sense of security knowing that your home is being monitored 24/7. 

Fingerprint and facial recognition door locks

Installing fingerprint or facial recognition locks can change your life, especially if you always misplace your spare key. Biometric technology and Bluetooth have already made their way into phones and tablets, but they are now starting to become more common in door locks. With just a glance or fingerprint scan, a lock can recognize a person by targeting facial features or fingerprint patterns to detect whether they are welcome or not. Not at home or lost your key? This technology can also be synced with a phone app or Bluetooth so that owners can remotely lock and unlock a door at the touch of a button. 

Indoor drones

Imagine your own personal security guard patrolling the halls while you are not at home. While this might not be common today, drone innovation has made strides within the home security space. Unlike traditional video cameras, drones provide better ground activity and can cover more areas. While you are away, automated drone technology will fly inside your home monitoring different rooms and areas. Take it a step further, users can create map paths for the drone to follow.

Sustainable Smart Home Tech

Solar panels 

Using solar panels for on-site energy generation has become a popular alternative to traditional electricity, especially in cities that get a lot of sun year-round like Miami, FL. Now, architects and designers are finding unique ways to incorporate solar panels into the design of a home, not just on the roof. Solar panels can be used in different ways that can save homeowners hundreds of dollars per month such as heating water, providing energy, and charging electric vehicles. They are also likely to enhance your home’s value, and depending on where you live, you can even earn tax credits and rebates.

Living plant walls

Plants are a fun way to bring color and life into your home. Living walls also known as green walls, can be a great way to style plain backdrops to create a striking focal point in your home. Besides design, living walls serve multiple sustainability purposes. They can be used to improve air quality as a natural air pollutant filter, serve as a noise buffer, and create added insulation during the winter months. Living walls can also be configured to filter out water from sinks, showers, and appliances. Water is redirected to the top of the wall, filters and irrigates plants, and is treated for reuse, creating the ultimate smart home tech piece for the environment. 

Home Fixtures

Human-centric lighting 

Light bulbs are a great entry-point into smart home tech. Connected to a smart device, lightbulbs can help you look like you are home when on vacation, change colors based on mood, save on energy consumption, and conveniently turn off all the lights with a single voice command. Using smart home lights throughout your house can also drastically upgrade the look and feel of a room or outdoor space. Consider adding smart light bulbs to your kitchen, bedrooms, and even driveway to adjust hue and brightness based on what you might be feeling.

Programmable thermostats 

Many people are not aware of how much a thermostat impacts the household budget. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling costs accounts for half of the average home utility bill. Smart thermostats seek to tackle this problem. Within one week of installation, smart thermostats can learn schedules to modify temperatures based on household activities. They can also track daily and monthly usage to get a sense of where heat and air are being directed to and adjust temperatures accordingly based on the season. 

In the Kitchen 

Kitchen appliances

For those who love to cook, consider adding smart appliances into your kitchen. Modern-day fridges can take phone calls, link to television, save energy, and provide recipes. However, new fridge tech has not stopped there. If you are out and about at the grocery store and want to check what needs to be replaced, some fridges allow you to access built-in cameras via your smartphone to see what’s inside your fridge no matter where you may be. Smart ovens are also starting to incorporate phone connectivity. People can preheat their oven on the way home, adjust timers remotely, and have notifications sent via text message when food is done cooking.

Kitchen counters and workspaces

Ditch the granite countertops and go with a smart work surface. One of the latest technologies in kitchen countertops includes a sink that can disappear and reappear with a single wave of the hand. Smart home tech also seeks to tackle problems such as food consumption. Kitchen scales are being embedded into the stone that can allow sensors to measure and weigh ingredients. With the data, a mobile app can provide curated recipes with the goal of preparing delicious meals without the food waste.

Spa Bathrooms

Smart showers & chromatherapy bathtubs

The perfect shower concert just got easier. A fun way to spruce up your bathroom time is by installing a Bluetooth speaker showerhead. These speakers easily connect to your phone to blast your favorite tunes while taking a shower. For something more sophisticated, showers are starting to double as steam rooms by trapping vaporous steam to elicit pore opening moisture. If you’re looking to relax after a long day at work, Chromatherapy, or color therapy bathtubs, can help put your mind and body at ease by using colored lights to elicit feelings. 

Touchless toilets and digital bidets

The toilet is one of the most germ-ridden locations in your home. Highly advanced toilets seek to keep things clean and comfortable by integrating features such as self-opening and closing lids, heated seats, deodorizing systems, and temperature-controlled water. For freshening up, digital bidets also can be automated for hands-free operation. Two self-sterilizing nozzles spray gently aerated spritzes of water which can be adjusted for temperature, pressure, and spray width. They even come with an air dryer and deodorizer. 

Making a Smart Home Gym

Touchscreen fitness mirrors

Smart home tech is bringing the gym to you. Touchscreen, wall-mounted fitness mirrors are the latest craze in home gym technology. If you are missing the instruction and motivation of an in-person trainer, simply turn on the screen and let an AI trainer provide guided workouts and fitness programs that fit your liking. New tech also includes virtual spotters, sensors to monitor every rep, and measuring your progress in real time. Remote group training has also become more popular, and groups can virtually work out together from the comfort of their home while still keeping the workout, music, and atmosphere people love about a local gym.

Workout equipment

If curating your workout is your thing, there are many products to help you keep track of your fitness goals. Smart dumbbells and kettlebells can automatically change weights up to 42lbs and track reps from the touch of a button. These are perfect for smaller home gym owners looking to get in simple workouts such as shoulder presses and deadlifts. Punching bags with smart technology are a great way to blow off some steam. These punching bags come equipped with trackers that you wrap around your hand to track punch speed and the number of punches where you can track your progress via an app. This is perfect for the person who loves a quick and specific workout. Stationary Bikes are a great way to get in that much-needed cardio, the newest technology offers pre-recorded classes that sync to the mechanics of the bike to automatically adjust resistance and incline as well as the ability to sync to smartwatches. 

Originally published by Redfin.

In a new era of education, distance learning has taken center stage and education apps have become the norm for students. In fact, weekly education app downloads skyrocketed 90 percent in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the last quarter of 2019, according to App Annie. And it’s not just young people—folks of all ages are turning to learning apps to better themselves in the new year. 

Virtual education, however, poses a unique set of challenges that include complicated technology and lack of self-motivation. Issues like these can be resolved by integrating voice assistant technology into education apps. An AI virtual tutor can also enrich education apps by creating a conversational experience for users that provides a broader approach to learning. 

eLearning Challenges 

As students continue their curriculums on mobile apps during the ongoing pandemic, they face four major obstacles. Thankfully, virtual voice assistants can easily address these common problems with voice recognition technology. 

First, app users face increased distractions and decreased focus at home, often lacking the self-motivation they need to succeed. Virtual tutors can provide consistent vocal encouragement that approaches face-to-face instruction. They can also identify problem areas for each student and create tailored practice sessions and recommend one-on-one tutoring. 

Second, education apps may not have the formal structure and lesson planning that many people rely on while studying. Voice-enabled assistants can provide direction such as verbal reminders of assignment due dates and scheduled study sessions and breaks. 

Third, users must navigate sometimes complicated or unfamiliar technology while using new apps, which can be a significant barrier to learning. By conversing casually with an AI assistant, they can have a more simple and natural app experience.

Finally, some students may feel isolated in a virtual classroom, which is compounded by continued social distancing measures. Fortunately, they can interact safely with a virtual assistant as they study from home. 

Enriching Education Apps  

In a traditional classroom setting, students learn largely through listening to their teachers and interacting with other students. However, as the pandemic continues and education apps rise in popularity, people lose the conversational aspect of studying. Voice assistants like Alan® can offer a more comprehensive approach to education by incorporating auditory and interpersonal learning into apps. These virtual study buddies are just what students need to stay focused as they navigate virtual classrooms. 

Voice technology elevates learning apps by combating common distance learning issues and expanding the virtual learning experience. Giving a voice to education apps can make all the difference in the world for students in 2021 and for years to come.  

People around the world are ready to refocus on fitness in 2021 after almost a year of staying home and social distancing. However, the vast majority of individuals fail to accomplish their yearly goals. According to U.S. News & World Report, 80 percent of people don’t achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Another obstacle is the ongoing pandemic, which will most likely limit the use of personal trainers and gyms for the foreseeable future.

Voice assistant technology can help resolution-makers overcome these challenges and stick to their new routines. A voice assistant can be easily integrated into wellness applications to provide a motivational element to home fitness. It acts as an AI personal trainer that uses conversation to not only help users reach their goals but also maintain long-term healthy lifestyles.

Voice Assistant Integration 

Trying out a wellness app can be frustrating. After all, exercising and eating well is difficult enough without struggling with a new app interface. Virtual assistants make this process simpler and more personalized by giving a voice to your fitness app’s features. They can help track sleep schedules, schedule workout routines and breaks, monitoring hydration levels, log progress, and more. 

Users can engage in natural discussions with the integrated assistant about these features and metrics. For instance, they could ask the virtual assistant how hydrated they are and it could respond with their hydration percentage and how much more water they should drink that day. Users can also chat with the assistant about their daily nutrition and which areas of their diet to improve. In short, virtual assistants elevate your fitness app with voice. 

Motivation and Engagement   

What sets a health app with a voice assistant apart from competitors is its ability to maintain user engagement. Using human-like conversation, it provides encouragement that goes beyond bland text notifications. Users benefit from the convenience that a health app provides without sacrificing the conversational feel of in-person interactions. 

Voice assistants use a friendly tone to motivate users to keep their New Year’s resolutions. They can support people throughout their health journeys by reminding them of their goals, providing encouragement during workouts, and communicating their progress. They can also give users voice notifications that keep them on track by alerting them to things such as a live workout starting in 15 minutes or a reminder to drink water. 

The Future of Home Fitness

Voice assistants can inspire users to reach their health goals. They keep them engaged by personalizing the experience and bridging the communication gap between them and the app. Connect with Alan AI to find out how to simply integrate a voice assistant into your fitness app to motivate users to keep their New Year’s resolutions in 2021.

Once social distancing measures are lifted, people will be able to return to gyms and in-person personal trainers. However, remote work and virtual lifestyles have become ubiquitous. Home fitness is the new normal and personalized motivation is key, making voice assistant technology an important feature of wellness apps both now and in the future.