There has been a wider acceptance of AI virtual assistants across the globe. Products like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortona, and Google’s Assistant are some of the best examples of these AI virtual assistant tools.  

This cutting-edge technology that mainly works by comprehending voice commands to complete users’ tasks has many useful examples: voice-to-text dictation, email management, customer service, help desk management, data analysis, and team collaboration tasks.

If you are keen on using AI virtual assistant platform in your professional or personal life, here are some of the virtual assistant tool tips to follow this year. 

Virtual assistant tools: Essential tips you will need this year! 

1. Be an informed user/buyer 

Being an informed buyer means having a complete understanding of the ins and outs of your IVA capabilities and then choosing the one that best fits your needs. You need to make a wise call on how best you can exploit the potential of IVAs in sync with your business requirements. 

Before you go ahead and decide to update your systems with new IVA, educate yourself about its capabilities and usage. The IVA technology is constantly evolving, and therefore you must keep yourself updated with their latest features and upgrades. Only then would you be able to leverage the IVA to its full potential.

It would be unwise to follow your competitors blindly when choosing an IVA for your business. The IVA systems they are currently engaged with may have become outdated, or better options may be available today.

Moreover, the traditional way of using a particular IVA system might not just be the only way to exploit its fullest potential. Having a clear understanding of what your IVA is capable of allows you to explore other facets of business operations where its feature could be used for a prudent purpose.

2. Create a business impact 

An adept leader or manager can easily comprehend that IVAs are not meant to replace human beings. Rather they are there to augment humans to help create a beneficial business impact.

IVA depends upon artificial intelligence to smoothen numerous business processes. Hence, they can process huge loads of data in a minuscule amount of time. However, the only component that is missing is human creativity. Therefore, to create a productive business impact, IVAs must be used to assist humans in business processes rather than replacing them.

You can enhance organizational productivity and profitability by using IVAs to automate and optimize. A prime example is using IVAs like Meet Sally to schedule meetings or Cortona to automate business tasks.

Using chatbots for social media and customer service helps to reduce the requirement of manual interference and thereby enhances efficiency.

Companies like HubSpot have integrated IVAs into their products or services to offer higher value to their clients. They do it to ensure that their efficiency does not reduce in the longer run. Certain companies go one step ahead by having their own customized IVAs for their products and services to create a business impact.

3. Improve personal productivity 

You cannot enhance organizational productivity using IVAs without using them yourself. Get acquainted with modern personal productivity tools like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Siri, etc.

The world is evolving, and we need to accept these advanced AI productivity tools into our lives to grow. Having a clear understanding of how the personal assistant tool helps make your life better gives you a better insight into using these for business purposes.

There are limitless possibilities for using personal time tracking and productivity tools to improve our day-to-day lives. Start the new year by adapting to this modern way of living.

4. Use chatbots smartly 

Mark the beginning of the next year by using chatbots smartly in your organization. You can start by offering 24×7 assistance using chatbots smartly into your organization. Chatbot makes sending automated messages to clients for generic inquiries, complaints, or feedback easy.

Make sure to be bent over on using chatbots for more advanced purposes like monitoring customer data to gain insights and devising a conversational marketing strategy.

Although they cannot replace humans completely, they tend to augment the reduction and automatize the workload.

5. Go beyond chatbots 

Chatbots are not merely automated responses. Their use goes much beyond the traditional scope of being used as pre-defined messages. The modern-day chatbot serves a sophisticated purpose since it is integrated with AI.

What redefines the meaning and usage of a chatbot are Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). You can go beyond chatbots once you understand the benefits of NLP and ML.

Empower your chatbots with NLP to upgrade them with features that allow interpretation of user inputs in natural language. Also, try to implement ML in the coming year to make your chatbots smarter by self-training based on data.

NLP and ML are two sure-shot ways to enhance the customer experience and facilitate flawless communication.

6. Overcome common challenges 

Focus your attention this new year on overcoming the three common challenges of IVAs:

The very first challenge in IVAs is that it lacks accuracy and personalization. Make efforts to eliminate these stereotype issues in your IVAs by using NL.

Another common challenge is that IVAs did not have the option of behavioral targeting. By following the behavioral targeting pattern, you can enhance your productivity and attain better efficiency using IVAs.

7. Quantify the benefits 

Don’t forget to quantify the benefits of using IVAs in your organization. IVAs like Dropbox, Google Workspace, Hootsuite, etc., helps to save valuable time and money. To help you appreciate the benefits offered by IVAs, you must quantify their results in terms of man-hours saved and cost-efficiency.  

8. Leverage AI 

VAs become IVAs when you leverage AI to enhance its purpose and capability. You can use AI to equip your virtual assistant tools for automated tasks like performing quick searches, retrieving information, adding tasks to the calendar, controlling devices, etc.

9. Be privacy and security savvy 

When it comes to hiring intelligent virtual assistants, the one thing that you need to take care of is the security and privacy aspect. You also need to take into consideration the trust factor. As you hand over passwords and valuable information to them, it becomes imperative to ensure that they are good enough to keep and hold it securely.

There are certain questions that you need to ask when you are about to take the hiring decision of intelligent virtual assistants:

• What is the mechanism the intelligent virtual assistant will adopt to manage passwords?

This is where you need to make the hard decisions of selecting the best tools to manage passwords that can be circulated across the organization whenever required without displaying them to the third party.

• How will the intelligent virtual assistant manage the security of their devices?

Since the intelligent virtual assistants will be logging into the system on your behalf on phones, laptops, desktops, etc., what is the best way to manage that? Think about a situation wherein you are not doing the work and assigning the task to an intelligent virtual assistant.

The most important question that should come to your mind is how to manage the security of the devices on which IVAs provide information to other team members? The key thing is, IVAs can use multiple devices; hence, this question needs to be answered very carefully.

Once you have answers to both these questions earnestly, all your concerns about privacy and security will rest in peace.

Conclusion 

AI virtual assistant tools are a blessing for people at large. Once you follow the virtual assistant tool tips mentioned in this write-up, it will help ensure that you maximize the output from your virtual assistant platform. 

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