How to Create an AI Assistant for Business

It may seem that today everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and the benefits of using its capabilities in different spheres of our life. It is really very inspiring to observe how this technology is changing the world around us and how we can apply it to facilitate and streamline various types of tasks that typically require a lot of time and effort.

That’s why it is absolutely natural that businesses working in multiple spheres demonstrate their interest in AI development services and are trying to be the first ones among their competitors to implement this or that kind of AI-powered solutions.

In this blog post, we’d like to tell you about one of the most promising types of software products that attract a lot of attention from companies of all sizes these days. That’s an AI assistant for business.

What is an AI assistant for business, and why do you need it?

To begin with, let us provide you with some general info about such a solution. In an extensive sense, this term can be defined as an AI-powered program intended for fulfilling various tasks and providing users with a wide range of services.

In other words, its performance is continuously improving over time. Moreover, it can understand natural language commands which significantly facilitates communicating with it.

All this means that an AI personal assistant for business can greatly enhance the productivity of its users by supporting them in various tasks, automating numerous processes, and helping to avoid huge volumes of manual work that lead to time losses. 

But to understand whether you need to consider implementing such a solution in your business processes, it will be useful to look at its advantages in more detail. Of course, most benefits can be industry- or even company-specific. Nevertheless, we’ve prepared a list of those points that can be relevant regardless of the business domain that you need to deal with.

Advantages you get with AI assistants

• Personal assistance. This benefit is probably the widest one. The same range of tasks that an AI assistant for business can perform will depend on the type of your solution and the initial goals that you have when you select it among ready-made products or when you turn to professionals for custom software development services. For example, such an AI-powered solution can make calls and even execute some other simple tasks like making appointments. It can also look for some information for you or read a written text for you while you do not have the possibility to do it.
• Enhanced productivity. AI assistants can perform various tasks instead of you, especially those that are repetitive and monotonous and typically require a lot of time. Thanks to this, you can concentrate on more creative and challenging activities. And together, you can form a perfect tandem. For example, an AI-powered program can process, analyze, categorize, and visualize various data you can easily use in your reports, speeches, and presentations. As a result, you can skip a huge part of exhausting preparatory work and focus precisely on the final result.
• Saved time. This benefit is closely tied to the previously mentioned ones. As the whole tasks or at least their parts are performed by a software solution, your efforts and time spent on them will be reduced.
• 24/7 customer support. In today’s business world, the competition is extremely high. All companies are doing their best to offer the highest quality of services to their clients, and the quality of customer support is one of the parameters that consumers typically take into account when they are choosing the company’s products or services. An AI assistant can answer the questions of your clients across various channels in a 24/7 regime.
• Increased accuracy. As some tasks will be performed by an AI-powered solution, it will be possible to avoid a lot of mistakes that are typical for humans. As a result, the overall quality of the provided services will become higher. And as the assistant will continuously learn, the task performance's quality and speed will also follow a positive trend.

Types of AI assistant

If you are interested in starting using an AI assistant for business owners or employees, or a similar product for clients, you need to know what types of these solutions exist today. We can define three main categories of such products.

How to include a voice assistant in an app

Though AI-powered assistants can be launched as standalone products, a lot of businesses prefer to add such functionality to their applications that are aimed either at the external or internal audience of users. There are several approaches to integrating AI functionality into your software.

1. APIs and external tools from trusted providers. This option is a perfect choice in those cases when you already have an application, and you want to enrich it with an already existing AI solution. You can rely on additional tools and APIs that can be seamlessly integrated with your software. The exact ways of conducting such integration can differ depending on the exact products that you are interested in. Nevertheless, as a rule, developers say that API integration is the most feasible approach if you are delighted with the functionality that this or that external service can offer. Among the examples of such products, we should name Siri, Cortana, and Google Now.
2. Open-source APIs and services. Our second point on the list is very similar to the first one. But in this case, we offer you to choose open-source options that are available on the Internet. As a rule, there are also a lot of various tutorials, guides, and instructions that describe a step-by-step process of integrating such services into your products. 
3. AI voice assistant built from scratch. If you have already analyzed the market and you see that there aren’t any solutions that meet your requirements and can be suitable for your app, you have the option to develop the necessary functionality from scratch. When you build an AI assistant on your own (or when you work with a development team that can do it for you), it is possible to add any functionality that you may need. For example, you can create an image recognition feature, text-to-speech, or speech-to-text tools. As soon as the development process comes to an end, you will have to integrate your AI assistant with your existing application.

How to make an AI assistant for business?

With the new opportunities that your company can leverage thanks to AI functionality, the implementation of a virtual assistant into your business processes can become a very good decision. But it’s obvious that already at the planning stage, you need to take into account the financial aspect of such an initiative to estimate the feasibility.

So, how much for an AI virtual assistant for business? The cost of any software project seriously depends on a wide range of factors, such as complexity, the required tech stack, and others. When you are thinking about possible ways to enrich your app with AI functionality and reduce your expenses, you can consider the integration of an open-source API.

If you decide to build such a solution from scratch, below you can find a plan that we’ve prepared for you.

1. Decide on the exact tasks that you want your AI assistant to be able to fulfill. When you understand what you expect from such a solution, you can create a list of features that will be required. In general, already at this step, you need to have a good vision of the final product. 
2. Find a development team. If you have in-house developers who can create such a solution for you, you can skip this step. But if your in-house resources are insufficient for this project or you do not have an IT department at all, you can outsource such services. To be sure that you are going to establish cooperation with a reliable provider, we recommend you carefully consider the company’s portfolio, reviews left by its clients, and its business model. When the team is chosen, developers will need to estimate the time to realize your project, its general complexity, and the required budget.
3. Choose an AI technology and the entire tech stack for your solutions. The selection of tools should depend, again, on the desired functionality. When we are talking about core technologies, among the available options are ML (machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing).
4. Think about the ways to train your AI assistant. To achieve better performance of your solution, you must ensure a good training plan and prepare a rich dataset. Try to include as much valuable data as possible. In the future, you will have to train it with the latest data in order to make sure that your virtual assistant fully corresponds to your ongoing business needs.
5. When it is ready, test its performance. It is vital to evaluate its functioning and to check whether it performs all the tasks exactly how it is supposed to. This step can also include user acceptance testing. In other words, a group of users should test the performance of a virtual assistant in different real-world scenarios.
6. Start implementation of your AI assistant into business processes. Though an AI assistant for business is intended to facilitate various tasks for you, you should be ready to invest some effort into integrating it into your system or app and getting accustomed to using it.
7. Test the solution in real-life scenarios. After the implementation, before fully relying on your virtual assistant, you need to ensure that it can perfectly cope with all the tasks in real life, such as processing client requests, preparing reports, or processing real business documents.
8. Maintain, scale, and update your solution. It is highly recommended to track the performance of your AI assistant continuously and to enrich it with new knowledge and functionality depending on the directions of your business development. 

Key tips: Features for your AI personal assistant

The set of features that you will include in your solution will depend on the exact tasks that you want your AI assistant to solve, as well as the peculiarities of your business processes. But to help you make up your mind on the desired functionality, we offer you to consider the following features that boast the highest popularity among users today.

• STT (Speech-to-text). With this functionality, AI assistants can perceive natural language in a voice file or stream format and convert it into written text.
• TTS (Text-to-speech). Such a feature is aimed at converting written texts into human-like speech. It can be useful when you want to know how words in a foreign language should be pronounced or when you do not have time to read texts. In such a situation, your app can do it for you while driving or doing other things.
• Voice interface/management. It will let you facilitate and streamline the entire process of interaction with your AI solution. The main tasks for users will be to formulate clear requests for getting desired outcomes.
• Computer vision. This technology makes it possible to extract valuable info from videos and images. But even more important for an AI assistant is that based on the received visual data, it can perform various actions and make decisions. For example, you can ask your AI assistant to prepare a summary of the video for you. Moreover, it is possible to train more advanced AI systems to recognize gestures and mimics in real time.
• Support in decision-making. Thanks to this advanced functionality, your AI assistant will help you to make business decisions following historical data, market predictions, and general patterns detected in the industry.

Final word

In the business world, artificial intelligence has enormous transforming power. It can fully revolutionize the way the majority of our processes are organized today. But together with these changes, it also brings numerous opportunities that you can’t miss.

Today, implementing an AI personal assistant for business can become a huge competitive advantage, but tomorrow… who knows? We have solid grounds to presuppose that tomorrow it will become a standard for the majority of industries and you won’t be able to keep your market positions without it.

If you are already thinking about the possibility of building and integrating such a solution into your systems, we will be happy to help you with this task. Our developers have rich expertise in AI and are continuously expanding their knowledge in this sphere. Drop us a message, and we will contact you as soon as our specialists study your request.