After I explained the challenges of good voice assistants and shared out our learning in my first blog, today I am sharing my thoughts about possible applications for the business sector. In other words, the question of which new applications are made possible by speech technologies. The spectrum here ranges from documentation, to identification at a hotline, to a bot for appointment booking.
24/7 appointment booking via a voice assistant
We are currently testing the use of a voice assistant for making appointments by phone, for example with a doctor. Because this is currently not going well from either a customer or business perspective.
From the customer's point of view: Who hasn't experienced it? You need an appointment for a checkup and you're dialing your fingers to the bone. Either it's busy, you're endlessly on hold, or you call outside of office hours.
From the perspective of the clinic team: Patients are waiting in front of the reception desk because they have questions, need a prescription, or want to drop something off. The phone rings incessantly and examinations should be done, injections should be given, or blood should be drawn.
On both sides: Dissatisfaction. But the appointment itself could be made quickly.
A scheduling assistant (a bot for making appointments) can solve this problem. It can be reached around the clock, even outside the clinic’s opening hours. The 24/7 available voice assistant makes this possible. It also helps those who do not have internet access or people who cannot read or are visually impaired or people who simply like to pick up the phone and call.
In this way, the assistant takes the pressure off the clinic’s staff and frees up their time for more important tasks. It also offers additional services such as confirmation by text message or a reminder message before the appointment.
If you want to get an impression, here is a video that show what such a service might look like:
On the way to a solution
If it could be so simple, why doesn't this solution exist yet? Because there are a few things to consider while implementing it: The bot must know dialects and, at best, several languages. It must correctly understand the names of the patients, the specific appointment types and, above all, their concerns and must therefore be trained in advance with a variety of possible concerns in dialog form.
To avoid having to learn the basics of making appointments, we are working with a partner who already has experience in this area: Cituro. We are taking its system to a new level of user experience through speech ("voicification"). A beta test is currently underway, and we are very excited to see more insights and experiences it will bring us.
Other B2B applications with potential
In addition, we see great potential for a "HealthCare Documentation Bot". It saves valuable time for doctors in the healthcare sector through voice-based protocol creation. Or hotline user verification. This enables customers to identify themselves by voice instead of a lengthy and error-prone manual verification process.
With services like these, we want to position ourselves as a trustworthy, human-centric provider of voice services on the business side. If you are interested in developing your own conversational AI products for the business domain with us, please reach out to us at: http://voicification.ai/
On topicOur Voice Assistant strategy
