Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there is still debate among industry analysts, experts, and the technology community about their correct definition.
And it's important to note that while there is no one definition that everyone can agree on, we can still differentiate the concepts in terms of their functionality.
A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with through a chat interface.
This makes a lot of sense, as the word itself is composed of “chat”, which would indicate a conversational or chatter function, and “bot”, which can refer to an application that can be programmed to automate tasks.
On the other hand, if we look at “virtual agent”, the word composition makes it seem like an “agent” is someone (or something) that can act on behalf of a person, and the “virtual” refers to the virtualization of that individual.
No matter how you define these terms, both technologies algeria whatsapp data must have the ability to identify keywords, access knowledge articles for relevant information, and provide a list of results to users.
But one thing that can help differentiate the two concepts is that a virtual agent can go beyond just searching a knowledge base, offering a more efficient and cost-effective solution to reduce labor costs.
Types of virtual agents
Agents and chatbots can be programmed with a variety of technologies. For activities with a more defined structure, conversation scripts and speech or text recognition grammars can be defined.
In this way, especially active agents, who direct conversations with customers on the other end of the line or keyboard, can conduct activities such as research, negotiations and much more on their own, using rules and processes, with full integration with the company's systems, to provide fluidity and speed in interactions.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence has been a frequent topic in recent years and AI technologies, which include virtual agents, are at the forefront of most companies.
But even in “out of the box” solutions, virtual agents need to be trained to function properly without sacrificing the user experience.
This is where AI capabilities like machine learning and natural language processing come into play.
Now that we have defined the basic concepts and started talking about AI and machine learning, let's delve deeper into the discussion about chatbots and virtual agents.
Remember: chatbots are software developed to simulate a human conversation in interactions carried out through text. As we mentioned earlier, the much talked about voice robots are the same as Digital Agents or Virtual PAs.
Therefore, a user can ask a question or type a command and the robot responds or performs the requested action. It is possible to develop robot processing with predefined rules, with speech recognition, that negotiate collections and sales approaches, for example.
Chatbots can be considered as the mouthpieces of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They are, in practice, an accessible form of AI commonly used in sales departments, service devices, billing operations, consumer applications and customer service.