Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the introduction of an API that makes it easy for developers to create “chatbots” on Facebook, marketing and customer care professionals have to come to grips with “Bots.” As Casey Newton in The Verge explains, with more than 900 million people using messenger on a regular basis, Zuck sees bots “replacing 1–800 numbers with a mix of artificial intelligence and human intervention.”

Contact center operators around the world have to take note. Long-time toll-free marketer, 1–800-FLOWERS was part of the demo at F8 (Facebook’s developer conference). In his keynote Zuckerberg noted that “You never have to call 1–800-FLOWERS again.” His declaration serves as a wake-up call to enterprise marketing, customer care and contact center operations professionals. The ensuing “Botsplosion” (coined by Opus Research’s Amy Stapleton) will rock the staid worlds of customer care and contact center operations. I go into much more depth about the implications of Facebook’s Bot API in this post on Medium.

At Opus Research, we focus, not on Bots, but on “Intelligent Assistants” (IAs). Last October, we issued the first Intelligent Assistance Landscape, which was discussed in this post on Venture Beat. We have officially updated the IA Vendor Landscape, depicted in this graphic:

An interactive version of this graphic is available here.

The top row of the landscape in composed of two overall functions for a robust Intelligent Assistant, “Conversational Technologies, which I think of as the “Smart User Interface”, and “Intelligence Assistance Technologies”, which I think of as “AI for IA”.

Looking at the Conversational Technologies area, the proliferation of ‘bots is reflected in the comparatively large number of vendors in the “Text I/O” category. This reflects the broad array of entry points for text-based input. In the original landscape “virtual chat agents” on e-commerce Web sites dominated this area. it has rapidly extended to a variety of text-based messaging platforms, including SMS text, social networks and messaging apps.

You’ll also notice that we’ve added “Emotion & Sentiment” to the Conversational Technologies. This anticipates growth in the community of empathetic IAs in the form of subject matter experts (Personal Advisors) as well as in the Enterprise Virtual Agent domain. It starts with the use of speech analytics to detect the urgency of a call or a home robot to recognize the general mood of a medical patient.

Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Semantic Search remain core as the largest solution set in the “Intelligent Assistance Technologies” section. Indeed, the ability for a self-service or “assisted self-service” platform to rapidly make sense of what people say or type in their own words is at the heart of what makes Intelligent Assistance popular. However, it is increasingly evident that companies have already made investments in two other core technologies that comprise the foundation of IA.

Knowledge Management systems are each company’s institutional memory. They are repositories for the records, employee manuals, collateral and other documents that can be ingested, analyzed and converted into the basis for successful responses to natural language queries for customers and employees alike. Therefore, KM vendors are being followed more closely in the IA Landscape.

Speech Analytics resources are also establishing themselves as key for IA. We’re entering the 3rd generation of Speech Analytics platforms. Earlier versions were used almost exclusively to cull through recorded conversations between contact center agents and customers to detect problems and suggest remediation “for training purposes” and for workforce optimization. Today’s systems can support real time recognition of caller intent and prompt agents or virtual agents with the proper response to a customer query or comment.

That makes existing investment in Speech Analytics and Knowledge Management effective entry points into the world of Intelligent Assistants. For more insights into the current state and future direction of IA,  register to attend the Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences (#IA-Squared) in London next week. Because we’re bringing together the leading vendors and leading edge implementers of IAs in enterprise settings, you’ll have a chance to gain first-hand knowledge of what today’s technology is capable of and how it is being put to use in the wild. I hope to see you there

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Natural language processing, intelligent Assistants, Customer service