Voice-based services have been ramped up by customer-facing companies and government agencies, in an attempt to save time, money, and connect more proactively with the population of smaller communities.
Flipkart, a Walmart-owned e-commerce firm, and Bharti Airtel Ltd, a telecom operator, have recently added voice search to their apps in English and Hindi. Axis Bank has also implemented AXAA, an AI-powered multilingual voice bot, at its call centres. The voice bot, developed by Vernacular.ai, a Bengaluru-based startup, can be extended to support over 10 Indian languages and 160 dialects.
Several companies in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector registered a spike in call volumes in the early months of the pandemic as more consumers tried to reach out to them for help. However, most conventional contact centres were unprepared to cope with the sudden rise.
Voice services have many advantages for businesses, including the ability to reduce costs by over 40% to 50%. Arup Roy, research vice president at Gartner said that the voice services can be used to gauge customer sentiment during a conversation, this can help increase sales, provide better insights, and provide better service to customers. According to industry experts, technical advancements mean people can do a lot more with voice commands, with greater precision and in their preferred language.
Previously, technology was not advanced enough to deal with the nuances of voice contact. “The technologies that are coming now employ radical new models that increase the productivity of natural language conversations,” Roy said.
This is encouraging user adoption: in 2020, interactions with Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa rose by 67 percent, with non-metros responsible for more than half of all interactions.
In addition to the private sector, the government is beginning to recognise the value of voice-based services. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is looking for a partner agency in the fields of deep learning, cognitive learning, and machine learning to help them deploy voice-enabled chatbots for UMANG and other government services.
Voice-based programmes on citizen-centric channels make it easier for the government to reach out to people who are blind, illiterate, or prefer to communicate in their native tongue.
