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RESEARCH
ANALYSIS
TRENDS

How conversational AI is changing the

game in times of COVID-19

COVID-19 has placed massive stress on communities Conversational AI uses information discovery, NLP,
and economies around the globe. Virtually every and other technologies to communicate with human
industry — whether healthcare, banks, hotels, or beings, helping them execute tasks, answer questions,
retailers — are exploring ways to communicate with and find information more quickly and effectively.
customers while their physical locations are closed to Traditionally, NLP has used ontologies and taxonomies
the public. Call centers are swamped, as anxious with a lot of human linguistic assistance to process
consumers look for answers about the virus or attempt dialog and unstructured text properly. However, with
to change travel plans. This situation is causing long the advent of deep learning algorithms and models
wait times and dropped connections — preventing such as BERT, IDC is seeing a resurgence of statistical
callers from getting help when they need it most. At the -based NLP that can handle very specific domains,
same time, call centers are short-staffed as agents call such as diseases like the coronavirus.
in sick or attempt to transition to remote work.
The advent of deep learning–based NLP has improved
Businesses are now facing two crises: unpredictable the ability to understand and handle a wide range of
spikes in demand for service and the need to prepare languages and domains and has facilitated the creation
for a potential economic recession. of a wave of conversational AI applications by many
existing and new vendors. The market for chatbots and
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI), aka virtual conversational AI software literally exploded last year,
assistants or AI-powered chatbots, that allows with numerous companies offering various tools and
information access through text- or voice-based technologies. IDC compiled a list of outstanding
interaction, is proving its worth during the coronavirus solutions powered by conversational AI that support
crisis. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) businesses across various industries during the
have enabled conversational AI technologies and coronavirus pandemic, such as:
widened their reach, leading to tools such as Siri,
Alexa, and Google Home that are part of many
consumers' everyday lives.

May 2020: Natural language processing & conversational analytics: data quality beyond reproach 8