Conversational AI platforms are taking the world by storm – introducing new ways to enhance customer experiences, boost team efficiency, and even reduce operational costs. In fact, some experts predict the market for conversational AI will be worth more than $49.9 billion by 2030.
But even as adoption continues to grow, some business leaders are still left wondering how conversational AI solutions work, what they can do for their organization, and most importantly, how they can make sure they choose the right software.
We’re here to demystify the concept of conversational AI once and for all. In this guide, we’ll show you the benefits and use cases of cutting-edge AI solutions, and introduce you to some of the top platforms tuned to different enterprise needs. Let’s dive straight in.
In this article:
What are Conversational AI Platforms?
Conversational artificial intelligence (or conversational AI) is the term used to refer to technology that enables computer systems to understand and respond to human interactions. Basically, conversational AI can communicate with people in a “natural” way.
Conversational AI platforms are the software solutions that make it easy to create, train, access, and fine-tune conversational AI tools, like sophisticated chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants.
These solutions allow companies in various industries to experiment with pre-built bots, design their own intelligent interactive tools, and embed conversational AI into various processes, from marketing and sales tasks, to customer service.
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Conversational AI vs Chatbots
Notably, while conversational AI platforms allow users to build and train chatbots – the bots you’ll create with these tools aren’t the same as the old-fashioned bots you might be familiar with. In the battle between conversational AI vs traditional chatbots, conversational tools are more intelligent.
Traditional chatbots relied on predefined rules to govern how they would respond to specific prompts. Conversational AI bots employ advanced algorithms to understand the intent and context behind a customer query, deliver personalized responses, and improve their performance over time.
Cutting-edge solutions can handle more complex tasks than chatbots, walking customers through a multi-step troubleshooting or purchasing process, with incredible accuracy. Some modern tools are even “multimodal,” which means they can understand and generate various types of content, from audio and images, to voice and text.
How Does a Conversational AI Platform Work?
As more companies continue to leverage conversational AI for customer service, sales and marketing tasks, the number of AI platforms is increasing. Each platform offers distinct features and benefits, but most solutions feature the same central components, such as:
- Input interface: The “input interface” in a conversational AI system is basically how users interact with a bot. It allows users to send requests via natural language text prompts, or speak directly to a bot using automatic speech recognition.
- Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms: NLP algorithms are the tools that enable conversational AI systems to understand and respond to human prompts. NLP algorithms extract user intent and information from text or audio, converting it into structured data.
- Natural language understanding (NLU): As a subset of NLP, natural language understanding allows bots to dive deeper into verbal and textual patterns and structures. It helps better understand the “intent” behind a query.
- Language generation: Language generation tools enable conversational AI bots to predict and issue the best response to a query based on current information and training data. Innovations in language generation algorithms allow modern bots to respond to customers in a distinct tone of voice, and even personalize each interaction.
Conversational AI Platform Use Cases
So, how can companies use conversational AI software? By far, the biggest “use case” for conversational artificial intelligence is in customer service.
AI bots with conversational AI capabilities can understand customer queries, troubleshoot and address problems, and even complete various tasks. For instance, with conversational AI in the insurance industry, companies could give every customer access to an always on assistant that can help them choose the right policy, or submit claims.
Conversational AI for financial services teams can help customers proactively share investment insights with customers, or address service requests. In retail, a conversational AI platform can allow companies to create bots that send personalized offers to customers, or help them troubleshoot account issues, and track orders.
The great thing about conversational AI is that it can help enhance every stage of the customer journey, from helping you generate marketing content (check out our SMS marketing best practices here), to helping buyers find the product or service that’s right for them.
After a purchase, conversational bots can troubleshoot and resolve common problems in real-time, enhance self-service interactions, and even increase future sales by sending targeted promotions to buyers based on their purchasing history.
Today’s AI solutions can even conduct market research automatically for teams, provide step-by-step training and coaching to sales, marketing, and customer service employees, and request feedback from customers. Plus, they can automate various sales processes, from scheduling demos, to scoring leads, and closing deals.
The Benefits of Conversational AI Platforms
The benefits of enterprise conversational AI tools are phenomenal. The right technology can streamline and improve marketing and sales strategies, and enhance customer experiences. Plus, conversational AI technology can make teams more efficient and productive too.
According to a Salesforce report, around 77% of customer-facing agents believe that automation and AI tools can help them achieve more in their roles.
Some of the biggest benefits of conversational AI include:
Improved Operational Efficiency
AI tools for customer support, sales, and service tasks save employees time. They can automate countless tasks, from conducting research, to sourcing customer feedback, transcribing conversations, and generating sales or marketing content.
Because conversational AI can handle repetitive tasks, it gives human agents more freedom to focus on other valuable, creative, and strategic processes, such as handling complex service requests.
Enhanced Customer Experiences
On a broad scale, conversational AI can transform customer service in a range of ways. First, it allows every company to deliver 24/7 support to customers, meaning they can improve customer service response times, minimize queues, and increase loyalty.
Top conversational AI platforms even allow companies to create bots that can interact with customers on a range of channels, from phone systems, to chat interfaces on a website, SMS, and more.
Higher Profits and Revenue
By enhancing customer experience with conversational AI solutions that can personalize, streamline and simplify interactions, companies increase their chances of retaining clients – improving long-term profitability. However, AI tools can boost profits in other ways too.
For instance, developing conversational marketing strategies with insights from a CRM platform can help businesses to deliver personalized product recommendations to customers at crucial points in their purchasing journey – increasing average order values.
Reduced Operational Costs
While conversational AI doesn’t eliminate the need for human employees in any workplace, it does help organizations to accomplish more with less. With the right platform, businesses can scale customer support, sales, and marketing operations without hiring additional agents.
Conversational AI tools also make it easy to manage sudden surges and changes in customer demand and queries, reducing a company’s risk of missing out on opportunities for growth.
Stronger Business Insights
Data is crucial to growth in any organization, and conversational AI tools are excellent at collecting data and converting it into actionable insights. By transcribing and analyzing recorded interactions, companies can use conversational AI for sales teams to identify better sales strategies.
Conversational tools can also provide businesses with insights into customer trends, preferences, and pain points, helping them to develop better products or customer service methodologies.
Key Features of Conversational AI Solutions
Now you know why conversational AI platforms are so beneficial to businesses, the next step is determining what you should be looking for in your ideal platform. As mentioned above, the features of different platforms can vary, but key capabilities to consider include:
- Multi-lingual capabilities: For global companies, such as organizations using conversational AI in the retail industry or ecommerce landscape, multilingual support is necessary. Look for NLP models capable of handling mixed languages, and even different types of input.
- Omnichannel support: The best conversational AI solution should empower you to support your customers across a range of channels, from SMS and messaging apps, to social media, phone-based conversations and more.
- Customization options: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to designing the perfect conversational AI bot. You should be able to customize your solution with industry-specific data, and your brand’s unique tone of voice.
- Flexible integrations: AI technologies work best when they can integrate seamlessly with existing tools. Look for solutions that support CRM, SMS integrations, or can link with your knowledge bases and data repositories.
- Ease of use: To maximize adoption, you need your AI solution to be easy to use. Ensure it offers a straightforward interface to business managers, agents, employees, customers, and anyone else who might be using the system.
Top 8 Conversational AI Softwares for Enterprises
So, which are the top conversational AI platforms worth considering today? We’ve examined some of the top contenders in the current market to bring you this insightful list.
1. Clerk Chat: The Leading Conversational AI Platform
If you’re looking for a leading conversational AI platform ideal for everything from streamlining customer service to enhancing marketing campaigns, Clerk Chat is the perfect solution. This platform isn’t just the top tool for business messaging, it’s one of the most impressive systems with AI agent access, offering AI-powered text messaging and omnichannel interactions.
With Clerk Chat, you can create a custom bot that can respond to and support customers on any channel of their choosing, from SMS, to iMessage, WhatsApp, RCS, and beyond.
Plus, since Clerk Chat integrates with your existing tools, you can fine-tune your bot with knowledgebase data, and even empower it to draw insights from your CRM to personalize each discussion. Organizations in retail, finance, healthcare, and beyond are already using Clerk Chat’s intuitive tools to automate workflows with SMS, create more compelling marketing campaigns and gather customer feedback.
Clerk Chat’s AI can even book appointments and handle transactions automatically, allowing your teams to focus more of their attention on other, complex tasks.
Beyond that, Clerk Chat prioritizes SMS compliance best practices and data security, to give your company and customers peace of mind.
Pricing:
Prices for Clerk Chat’s platform start at $9.99 per month, with access to unlimited messages and bring-your-own carrier capabilities.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Customizable AI agent flows | • No long-term free plan |
| • Integrations with dozens of business tools | |
| • Lists and campaigns | |
| • Compliance and security features | |
| • Intelligent reporting and analytics | |
| • Omnichannel support for sales, marketing, and customer service |
2. IBM WatsonX Assistant: Great Voice Recognition
IBM is one of the most reliable market leaders in the AI landscape, responsible for a range of conversational AI platforms, tools, and applications. The IBM WatsonX assistant gives organizations a toolkit they can use to create automated chatbots and advanced AI agents.
With IBM, companies can infuse bots with their own business data, and even implement strict governance and security rules. That’s crucial for highly-regulated companies looking to take advantage of the rise of conversational banking or healthcare solutions.
WatsonX has advanced NLP and intent recognition capabilities, and also makes it easy to seamlessly enable bot-human handover processes. Plus, you can create agents that can understand various types of human input – from written text to spoken voice.
Pricing:
IBM WatsonX can be a little expensive depending on the size of your business. Prices start at around $140 per month for up to 1,000 users, although a free “lite” version is available to some customers.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Seamless bot-human handover capabilities | • Complicated initial setup |
| • Multi-lingual text and voice interaction support | • Limited integrations compared to some competitors |
| • Easy to integrate with various enterprise data sources | • Can be expensive to scale |
| • Advanced NLP and intent recognition capabilities. | |
| • Access to unique data sets |
3. Kore.AI: Excellent for No-Code Development
Kore AI is another of the top conversational AI platforms allowing enterprise users in various industries to create bots that enhance both customer and employee experiences. Whether you’re focusing on delivering exceptional customer service in the financial industry, or you want to streamline customer service tasks in the retail space, Kore.AI has you covered.
The platform includes advanced natural processing capabilities for over 100+ languages, and allows organizations to seamlessly deploy bots across various channels. For instance, you can create bots that can integrate into voice systems, messaging apps and more. There’s also a fantastic toolset for monitoring the results of each AI conversation.
The best thing about Kore AI, however, is its simplicity for people with limited coding and technical knowledge. You don’t need any prior programming experience to start building bots. The only time you might need extra support is if you want to take advantage of complex integrations.
Pricing:
Kore.AI’s pricing varies depending on the tools you need, and how many customers or agents you need to support. Plans for “contact center AI” assistants start at around $29 per agent per month – although you do need to pay extra for voice add-ons.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Excellent no-code bot and intelligent assistant builder | • Voice interaction capabilities are limited (And can cost extra) |
| • Omnichannel support | • May be more expensive than some conversational AI tools |
| • Intent recognition and natural language understanding in multiple languages | |
| • Comprehensive monitoring and optimization toolset | |
| • Lots of customization options |
4. Amazon Lex: Best for AWS Customers
Amazon Lex is an end-to-end AI service that allows companies to build conversational interfaces into any application, with support for voice and text. It may be a little complex for some beginners in the industry, as it’s designed specifically for developers who want to build more sophisticated, bespoke chatbots, and autonomous agents.
Lex leverages some of the most advanced AI technology in the world, enabling access to natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition, and deep learning functionality. What makes it particularly compelling for companies already using AWS technologies, is its deep integration with the AWS ecosystem of services.
Lex connects seamlessly to solutions like AWS Lambda and Amazon Polly, allowing companies to create bots that can handle complex conversations, and draw on vast amounts of data. Amazon Web Services also prioritizes compliance and security, so companies can tap into the benefits of conversational messaging and customer service with fewer risks.
Pricing
Amazon’s pay-per-use model means that companies pay for each “speech request” and “text request” their bots need to process. Although the pricing is relatively transparent, you can end up paying quite a lot depending on the size of your business and the number of customers you serve.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • State-of-the-art AI and NLP capabilities | • Limited customization options compared to some alternatives |
| • Tight integration with the full AWS ecosystem | • High learning curve for beginners |
| • Support for multiple languages and text/speech recognition | |
| • Integrated user authentication and authorization features | |
| • Excellent customer support |
5. Boost.AI: Best User-Friendly Option
If you’re looking for an easy way to access conversational AI software, Boost.ai could be a great choice. This platform makes it easy for any company to build a custom AI solution in just a matter of days, complete with conversational and generative AI capabilities.
Boost.AI bots are omnichannel-ready, allowing companies to support customers across various touchpoints, from voice to messaging apps. Plus, its AI system is “self-learning,” which means it can constantly draw insights from conversations to enable regular performance improvements.
One of the great things about Boost.AI, is that you can use the platform to create various agents for different use cases. For instance, you can design customer-facing AI tools for service and support, as well as “agent assistance” tools for internal teams.
Pricing
Boost doesn’t share any direct pricing information on its website. You’ll need to reach out to the sales team for a custom quote based on the type of AI solution you want to build.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Quick and simple chatbot builder | • Fewer integration options than some alternatives |
| • Omnichannel support | • Content filtering can be complex |
| • Self-learning AI for constant improvements to performance | |
| • Multiple bot design options | |
| • Excellent customer support – particularly for enterprise companies |
6. Google Dialogflow: Best for Strict AI Controls
Google Dialogflow is a comprehensive toolkit which allows companies to build hybrid conversational AI agents with generative and deterministic AI functionality. This basically means you can maintain more control over how your bots respond to customer queries.
As one of the most popular conversational AI platforms, Dialogflow has helped countless companies discover AI’s impact on healthcare marketing, financial customer service, and more. You don’t even need a lot of technical experience to start building bots, thanks to the intuitive Vertex AI Agents builder, and Google’s range of flexible tools.
Dialogflow supports text and voice-based virtual agents, and makes it easy to fine-tune your agents with your own workflows and data. You even get access to advanced tools, like automated systems for determining customer satisfaction rates.
Pricing:
Google Dialogflow offers a free tier for beginners with limited usage, followed by “per-usage” pricing – starting at $0.002 per request.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Excellent security and guardrail features | • Limited customization options compared to some alternatives |
| • Seamless integrations with other Google services | • Can be expensive to use as usage begins to scale |
| • Easy-to-use interface for developing conversational flows | |
| • NLU support in more than 20 languages | |
| • Fantastic, advanced features |
7. Sprinklr: Excellent for Conversational Commerce
Sprinklr is a unified “customer experience” management tool that doubles up as a conversational AI platform. This platform empowers companies to create custom chat and voice bots, ideal for handling a wide range of customer service scenarios on various channels.
As a leader in conversational commerce technology, Sprinklr’s platform is ideal for companies that want to create bots that can deliver personalized product recommendations to customers, guide them through shopping experiences, and complete transactions.
This platform is also fantastic at giving organizations insights into their target audiences and their purchasing journeys. With the platform you can use insights from conversations to rapidly identify net promoter scores, customer satisfaction scores, and more. You can even filter through conversations by themes and sentiment scores.
Pricing
Sprinklr is one of the more expensive conversational AI platforms on this list, with plans starting at $199 per month, per user. There are also additional fees to pay if you want to use Sprinklr’s tools on certain channels, like SMS and voice platforms.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Fantastic conversational commerce features | • Expensive pricing |
| • Easily customizable bots that integrate with existing business tools | • Occasional technical bugs |
| • Omnichannel support | |
| • Automated CSAT and NPS surveys | |
| • Excellent analytical and reporting features. |
8. Cognigy AI: Exceptional Accuracy
Cognigy is a market leader in the world of conversational AI platforms, as well as generative AI tools and autonomous agent development. This company ensures organizations from any industry can build advanced virtual assistants for marketing, sales, and customer service.
With Cognigy’s low-code conversational AI platform, you can create IVR systems that can immediately support callers with complex requests, as well as smart self-service and agent assist tools. Plus, the Cognigy conversational AI software is fantastic for large global enterprises, with support for more than 100 languages and real-time translation.
Cognigy is a great choice if you primarily support customers on voice-based platforms, with its empathetic lifelike voice models, and accurate routing capabilities. However, it can be more difficult to leverage if you’re using other channels, like text messaging for business communications.
Pricing:
Like some of the other top enterprise conversational AI platform providers on this list, Cognigy doesn’t share transparent pricing information on its website. You’ll need to contact the company directly for a custom quote.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Excellent voice AI features | • No transparent pricing |
| • Intuitive and easy-to-use solution for beginners | • Not ideal for some customer support and marketing channels |
| • Lots of convenient integrations | |
| • Multilingual support for global companies | |
| • Integrated real-time translation |
How to Choose the Right Conversational AI Platform
We’ve listed quite a few conversational AI platforms above worth considering if you want to discover the potential of AI in education, finance, healthcare, retail, or any other industry. If you’re still struggling to narrow down your options, here are some key points to consider:
- AI capabilities: First, identify what kind of AI features the platform has. Does it use advanced language models and NLP or NLU frameworks? Does it support generative AI solutions, and how effective is it at carrying context across multi-level conversations?
- Security and compliance: Will your chosen AI solution adhere to TCPA compliance guidelines, AI ethical standards, and other regulations? Are there safeguards in place to protect your data and minimize the risk of AI bias and discrimination?
- Channel support: How easy is it to use your AI bots across multiple channels? Does your platform allow you to leverage the power of conversational SMS, AI-driven voice bots, message-based interactions on chat apps and more?
- Ease of use: Is your chosen platform easy to implement and use? Does it come with convenient visual builders for creating dialogue flows and guardrails for your bots? How much training do you need to give your agents so they can use the system?
- Scalability: Does your chosen platform allow for easy scalability? Aside from integrating with your existing tools and customer support channels, can it accommodate a growing number of users and customers easily?
- Customer support: Will the vendor you choose help you to integrate your conversational AI tools into your existing workflows? How much training and onboarding support do they offer, and how quickly does the team respond to service requests?
Want to create exceptional customer experiences?
Clerk Chat: The Ultimate Conversational AI Enterprise Platform
Conversational AI platforms give businesses in every industry an incredible way to upgrade their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. With the right platform, you can create bots that guide and support both customers and employees through countless tasks and processes.
While there are numerous enterprise conversational AI platforms worth considering today, Clerk Chat stands out for a few key reasons. First of all, Clerk Chat is a fully omnichannel solution that allows you to reach your customers and engage them wherever you are.
You can customize your AI agents to suit your specific business needs and take advantage of Clerk Chat’s integrations to infuse your bots with valuable data. Plus, Clerk Chat is incredibly easy to use, cost-effective, secure, and compliant.
Discover how you can take advantage of conversational AI software to increase sales, improve customer relationships, and turbocharge your team’s performance.
Dive into the AI revolution, with Clerk Chat, today.
