Did you know, over 80% of businesses are in favour of using chatbots by 2020? The demand for chatbots doesn’t seem to slow down since it encompasses a wide ecosystem of uses including automation, improving customer experience and mitigating latency.
With more than 65 million businesses using social media channels, chatbots have emerged as winners in grabbing marketing and sales opportunities by acquiring and engaging customers through messengers.
Amazon Lex is an AWS solution, powered by deep learning functionalities like automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLU), to publish bots for use across different channels.
Although, Amazon Lex has emerged as a key player in the highly competitive chatbot market, but is it worth the investment?
Chatbots, but why?
The chatbots aren’t new and have been in use since the late nineties. The first chatbot, Eliza, was built in 1966 at the MIT artificial intelligence laboratory.
Source: Edureka!
With Chatbots, businesses can get rid of the need for hiring assistants. With minimal initial costs, they can serve the customers 24*7, with flawless customer experience, bringing in better RoI for the business.
With smartphones changing user behaviour, people have started to prefer chats over calls, which explains why businesses need personalised chat feature.
Here's how chatbots can help solve user’s queries quickly and easily:
- Chatbots work on scripts and carry out actions as per defined workflow, with as many users as possible, without a minute delay. If the chatbot cannot answer an unexpected question it can be channelled to your support team.
- Are available 24X7, making them the best investment in your business.
- Can help automate routine mundane tasks, thereby reducing the overwhelming burden and enabling you to better able to focus on areas like sales and marketing, where your expertise is required.
How Amazon Lex helps bot development?
Amazon Lex is a service which allows enterprises to create chatbots through voice and text inputs in minutes without any coding knowledge, ensuring highly engaging user experience. It enables you to build interfaces by embedding and integrating with a wide range of platforms with the help of deep learning technologies such as:
- Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text
The platform helps in developing customized and highly specialized chatbots to interact with your customers efficiently, which comes with a pay-as-you-go feature.
What makes Amazon Lex best?
Amazon Lex-powered bots can become a key competitive advantage for enterprises allowing them to optimize processes and enable cost savings. Let’s understand the benefits of leveraging Amazon Lex to build bots.
- Automatic speech recognition
With this unique deep learning feature, it enables you to develop chatbots that offer highly engaging user experiences by allowing you to initiate lifelike conversations with your customers.
- Natural language understanding
The unique in-depth learning feature enables your chatbot to understand the intent of the conversation. It allows delivering a highly interactive user experience based on human-like conversations. The lex powered chatbots have in-built ability to process the information enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language bots.
- Versatility and automatic scaling
By allowing you to master the above two functionalities, it enables you to define new product categories.
Amazon Lex relieves you from the responsibility of the management of infrastructure by giving the provision of paying only for the features that you used. It allows you to build, test, and deploy your chatbots directly from the lex console and enables you to easily publish your voice or text chatbots to mobile devices, web apps, and chat services. Once published, your Amazon Lex bot processes voice or text input in conversation with your end-users and requires minimal to almost no human intervention post deployment.
- Seamless experience with easy to use console
Amazon interface gives just the right interface with easy to use, point and click features, guiding almost anyone through the process of building chatbots in a matter of minutes. With a few example phrases, Amazon Lex builds a conversation interface model to answer queries in text and audio format and complete sophisticated tasks.
Watch the video here to know how easy it is to create a chatbot of your own with Amazon Lex:
- Flawless integration with almost any platform
Amazon Lex can be easily integrated with many other AWS services including Amazon Cognito, and Amazon DynamoDB. AWS platform takes care of the bot's security, monitoring, user authentication, business logic, storage and mobile app development.
- Cost-effective solution for bot development
Amazon Lex doesn't involve any upfront costs or minimum fees except for text or speech requests made. It comes with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and with a minimal cost per request, it remains a cost-effective way to build conversational interfaces.
Srijan built Amazon Lex-powered bot for a global cleaning solution
Srijan worked with a global cleaning solution to help onboard assets to the IoT ecosystem, and collect, monitor, and analyze sensor data in real-time with the help of data visualization dashboards. This helped them track equipment conditions across their customer sites and automatically offer to serve as and when required.
Srijan then suggested building a chatbot in addition to the dashboards to find relevant data. Chatbots worked on “ask-and-answer” approach and on simply asking a query, the bot, available via mobile apps would analyze necessary data to give an answer.
Amazon Lex was used as the base interface for building the chatbots. Deep learning functionalities and natural language understanding in Lex allowed creating conversations that accurately captured the business logic. The bot built was equipped in delivering information on equipment performance metrics, the equipment health, savings potential and could help with which equipment to use in which scenario.
Building bots using Lex helped the client in the upselling business worth 90 million USD and increased the user retention of the beta user group from 8% to 42%, boosting the product upselling. It also allowed the analytics team to automate a lot of tasks which earlier happened over spreadsheets.
Read the case study - Developing Enterprise Chatbots for Instant Access to Asset Performance Data
Contact us
Srijan leverages its expertise and knowledge of Amazon Lex to create unique conversational interfaces using Amazon Lex for your enterprise. Our team of developers are skilled in creating world-class experiences for your clients located globally.
Get in touch to partner with us for your chatbot requirements.
