DEV Community: Shrutinaagar38

How Technological Disruption is Multiplying Pharmaceutical Revenue Worldwide?

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 06:11:12 +0000

The pharma industry has started realizing the potential of collaborating with technology and is presently dominated by some the top spenders on pharmaceutical R&D from the U.S. This includes ace companies such as Pfizer, Merk, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene corp etc., each of them investing billions of dollars every quarter.

On similar lines, because of the availability of sophisticated technology and a well-developed infrastructure for R&D, Singapore has emerged as one of Asia’s most advanced hubs for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing.

With a combined market capitalization of approximately $1.9 trillion, the wave of technology has even influenced the big threes of the market i.e Apple, Google and Amazon to invest heavily in the pharma and health sector today.

How Technology Saves Revenue for Pharma Companies
Here are the ways technology is enabling the pharma industry to reduce its expenditure while continuing to sustain their longevity.

Building a Direct Connection with Your End-Users

Although the end-users for pharmaceutical companies are the patients who consume their products, the pharma companies don’t usually get the opportunity to connect with them directly. Technological advancements such as mobile apps have given the pharma companies a way to engage with their customers one on one.

Many pharmaceutical companies can now help patients directly with the availability of smartphones. Companies like Novartis have taken a similar initiative by introducing apps like Together in HF, a social network that connects the heart patient community and the doctors to provide useful medical content to the patients.
Improved Diagnostics

Technology has made it possible to deliver a personalized diagnosis to patients today. With devices like wearables in healthcare, a repository of customer data has become accessible to pharma companies.

With the help of smartphones, it has become possible to access this data in an organized fashion, thereby becoming an instrument for offering efficient diagnostics and bespoke patient care. Companies like Proteus Digital Health have been able to explore the utility of technology to produce ingestible sensors to help physicians track and monitor patients on smartphones.
End to Human Experimentation in future.

Technology in the pharmaceutical industry will also help to put end to ethical dilemmas of testing drugs on humans. Not only will this method save time and capital, but will also be more reliable.
Real-time Technology for R&D

Another advantage of teaming technology with the pharmaceutical industry is the improvement in research and development. Bringing real-time technology and clinical trials together, pharma companies can establish a stronger foothold in R&D.

With high levels of productivity, inventory, and service, the drug production process can reach its maximum potential in less time.
Availability of Analytics for Drug Development. The pharmaceutical companies will be able to access authentic patient data which will assist these companies in understanding the after-effects of a drug.

With the availability of constant monitoring of symptoms and signals, the drug development companies will be able to understand their products better and also provide relevant reporting to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).

Gamifying Health for Patients: Motivation works better than commands. The usage of mobile apps for gamifying procedures, medical advice, and products for both physicians and patients will increase their adherence and prompt them to follow a healthier lifestyle.

Replacing the traditional advertising and incentivization techniques with gamifying experiences will enable the customers to absorb the information about their options better and be better engaged.

Many reputed pharmaceutical companies have already started exploiting technology for the growth of their business. For example, Pharma giants, Sun Pharma launched a revolutionary mobile app for asthma patients called RespiTrack, back in 2016.

The app helps the doctors to monitor patient’s progress and increase their medical compliance. Similarly, Abbott Healthcare introduced a heart and liver app called Knowledge Genie that helps physicians to access the patient’s medical information easily. Such innovations in apps from the pharma industry can become an inspiration for creating similar apps for monitoring patient’s health.

Emerging Pharma Trends in the Coming Years

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

With the IoT healthcare market reaching an estimate of 136 billion USD by 2021, companies from the pharmaceutical sector are collaborating with tech companies to create devices that can track and monitor various chronic and lifestyle disorders using real-time data.

3D Bio-Printing

Presently 3D Bio printing or additive manufacturing is one of the leading innovations in the medicine production industry. It is still very novel in the pharmaceutical sector with the very first 3D printed prescription drug, Spritam being developed in 2016.

3D Bio-Printing can be widely used for printing drugs that have different release rates, printing live tissues and also for drug tablet printing with a personalized dosage.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Through AI and machine learning, it has become possible for pharma companies to interpret patient data to understand the physiological patterns of humans. Solutions driven by AI have been able to help the pharma companies to even identify and predict results in a virtual patient.

With the rapidly changing world of technology, the medicine and healthcare industry is beginning to revolutionize. It’s time that pharma companies who aspire to become business leaders in the pharma world found new disruptive solutions to thrive and rise on the digital wave to save on colossal resources and time.

If you are looking for mobile app development , or ios outsourcing development , drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

Disrupting the Insurance Sector: The Digital Way

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 06:03:21 +0000

Digitization over the years has turned into an overused buzzword and has created much noise across many industries. While this concept of ‘going online’ is benefiting many industries in multiple ways, it has helped the early adopters of the insurance sector formulate new business models that can better deliver on customer expectations.

However, digitization still is virgin territory as far as the insurance sector is concerned given no insurance company has completely embraced this change. However, as companies are adopting and implementing digital transformations, there is the following list of benefits which emerge out of it:

Automating Claims and Delivering on Customer Expectations
Meeting consumer demand, as well as expectation, is the prime focus of most insurance companies. A customer wants his journey to be as simple as possible, for example, one-click login, clear and precise information about products and services, quick delivery, etc. are some common expectations of a client from their service provider in a digital age.

Automation can reduce the cost of a claims journey by as much as 30% – McKinsey

Reducing the processing times for claims and hence meeting the demands of clients will by default increase the core profits of a company, while at the same time helping them improve customer retention. The insurance sector has been kept away from digitization given most stakeholders in the industry believe it to be a low engagement territory.

However, automating the process, knowing and analyzing your consumer behavior can help you easily underwrite claims as well as to detect fraudulent claims.

Customer Self Service
By 2020, a customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human – Gartner

Insurance companies to succeed need to look beyond compliance, risk assessments, etc. and ensure that they can surpass the client’s requirement. Encompassing digitization a company can reach out to a variety of customers and hence develop a multi-modal business that can cater to a diverse population.

Companies are increasingly building solutions that require minimal user intervention, for example, they can apply for insurance with a mobile application and can also submit the first notice of loss (FNOL) using the same. From instant claim status checking to insurance renewal, with the right digital tools insurance sector can reduce friction and improve customer services.

Increase Sales Productivity
According to a report by Accenture, digitization can increase the sales productivity of an organization by almost 10-15%. By analyzing a customer’s need insurance companies can develop and market products and services which perfectly fit the client’s need. A potential customer in dire times doesn’t want a service center operator asking him to chose between options, instead what they need is an immediate solution.

By analyzing customer’s past behavior, his immediate mood as well as bills, etc., insurance companies using the machine learning algorithm can propose solutions that can almost instantaneously turn a potential client into a customer.

Automated Underwriting
Technology driven by data can help achieve some serious gains across any industry or sector. However by ‘automated underwriting’ we don’t mean a ‘human-free’ version, rather it would be an ‘error’ free version.

Automated underwriting can be achieved by fitting in sensors within cars as well as driver gears to see the amount of risk a driver was exposed too. Similarly, drones and satellite feeds can be monitored in cases of home insurances.

In digital times, the human talent combined with the machine’s power will be required to identify new forms of risks, and at the same time improve the efficiency of the current underwriting decisions.

Digital Customer Onboarding and Due Diligence
With technologies such as blockchain in place, the process of customer onboarding and due diligence can be better than ever. Similar to Social Security Number or AADHAR number, identity verification of a client can be achieved through the decentralized technology called blockchain and once done service providers across multiple sectors can utilize the same.

Insurance companies using AI can develop and display customized interfaces for users where they can find policies and offers which fit directly with their needs and can in real time compare them with each other.

The Path to Digitization
If a company is to become genuinely digital, there are two pointers which it should keep in mind:

Design Great Solutions: To ensure the platform they have built is sustainable an insurance company needs to choose the right technology combined with a cloud solution. A mixture of legacy and modern systems often leads to chaos and a shift to either one of them in the future becomes a daunting nightmare for organizations.

Scalability should be a Priority: Insurance companies are looking for a digital overhaul, should try and incorporate agile functions in their ecosystem which are capable of handshaking. There are many regulations around the insurance industry; hence it becomes necessary to have a model that can be built and structured and shaped as per the requirements of clients.

The otherwise slow-moving insurance sector has now begun to catch up with other industries as far as adopting digital technology is concerned. If you are also operating in the same domain, make sure to hire skilled mobility solution developers who can help devise a solution that brings you at the forefront of the inevitable digital age.

If you are looking for mobile app development , or ios outsourcing development drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

How Travel Applications are Fueling the Global Economy?

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 05:17:14 +0000

According to a report published by the World Travel and Tourism Council, by the year 2028, the tourism sector is expected to grow by $12.4 billion at an annual growth rate of 3.8% p.a. As the industry continues to expand, it has started embracing digitization which in turn has made the complete process of B2B and B2C interaction agile and frictionless. Ever since the Internet boom, consumer expectations have heightened and the travel industry is adapting to provide customers or travelers with the best in class service as well as value for their money. With a plethora of travel applications, it has now become more accessible to search, book and travel to the ends of the world.

As we enter the year 2019, we decided to look at the top reasons which have made travel applications – a catalyst – to the rise of the global economy.

Giving Tailored and Unique Experience

Thanks to mobile app development , Travel applications have shifted from just being another application one rarely opens on their phone. They have now turned into an integral part of most consumer lives — similar to a messaging app they use like WhatsApp or commuting application such as Uber. Moreover, with the advent of intelligent booking systems now included in most travel applications travel agents and travel agencies have turned obsolete.

Intelligent booking systems designed to provide customized experiences allow users to set reminders, compare prices, avail attractive discounts all within a single platform. Add to that the user reviews and testimonials and a customer can choose the place to stay or visit, with a few clicks and scrolls, at the comfort of his home.

Smooth Bookings and Reservations on the Go

Helping both the vendor and the consumer alike, travel applications tend to streamline transactions and hence make it easier for both the parties to keep track of the money they spend and earn.

For example, a user can easily book a hotel a thousand miles away without the need to leave his home, and a hotel can receive the payment as well as guest details in a fast and frictionless manner. Be it digital receipts or the booking confirmation these applications have made the process completely paperless, while at the same time avoiding intermediary costs (travel agent fee, costs of international money transfer, etc.).

More Customer Data to Improve your Business

The travel and tourism industry solely operates on user reviews and experiences. If a user visits a destination and finds it appealing, the place is likely to see more visitors visiting it in the time to come. Similarly, terrible experiences with poor amenities would leave a destination wanting for tourist and visitors.

Streamlining businesses and transactions through travel applications allow business owners to gather more customer information sequentially and process this information/reviews to find out ways to improve their business.

Easy to Do Behavioural Marketing

Utilizing the data and metrics obtained from the travel applications allows travel companies to gain insights into where the customer spends his time online. This includes a diversity of information such as what applications the user gravitates towards, what they like, what they don’t like etc. Each of these factors acts as a critical driver` for the travel companies to offer the right product and services from the supplier to consumers.

Travel companies think of these applications as a testing ground where they get to decipher what consumers need and based on the requirements create discounts and offers which turns visitors into customers.

To increase the tourist’s inflow, various countries have launched travel applications which will help provide both the residents and non-residents a deeper insight into what the country has to offer. Some of these applications include:

Incredible India App

A location-based travel application, the Incredible India App gives users information regarding government approved tourist service providers aside from letting them know about the hotspots within the city. From government approved guides to government registered hotels, a user can quickly obtain information on his device with a single request made on the app.

Tripgator Application

Travel Application Development, How Travel Applications are Fueling the Global Economy?
The Tripgator app helps tourists navigate through the places of attractions within India. Aside from guiding them about favorite hotspots, the application helps them find out prices of hotels, entry fees of monuments, and location of amenities like hospitals, ATMs etc.

TravelSmart

A Canada based travel application, Travel Smart can be used across the globe. Despite serving as a general travel guide to tourists and visitors, the app allows you to access global emergency numbers in cases of issues and problems. The application further assists with travel insurance and policies and helps to file the same with a few clicks.

How will These Travel Applications Evolve in 2019?
As technology and times evolve so do these travel applications. Below are the top 5 trends we are likely to see being adopted in the year 2019.

Wearable Travel Apps

Ever since the launch of the first Apple watches in the year 2014, wearable applications have started gaining traction. Though there are some limitations that prevent wearable applications from seeing mainstream adoption, research shows that these applications have a definite place in the market.

With the wearable travel applications, the process of commuting can be made frictionless and convenient for users, for example, airlines push updates directly on the passenger’s smartwatch. Similarly, the live locations of cabs and taxis can be made visible.

Chatbots

Chatbot, a use case of AI, has excellent potential to be successful in easing the commute and assisting the customers with their queries. Chatbots can be designed to analyze the user response and their travel patterns as well as choices, and hence offer travel options at an affordable price.

While they will save the travel companies money spent on employing resources to answer user queries, they will also be able to offer a personalized experience to the user.

Predictive Analysis

One of the most exciting developments travel applications can see is the inclusion of predictive analysis. Predictive analysis is the analysis of the present data set to predict future behavior. This analysis if incorporated in travel applications can help find the best possible route at the best price for use in the times to come. This will help alert users about when to book tickets to specific destinations and when to avoid based on past analysis.

Travel Application Development, How Travel Applications are Fueling the Global Economy?

In the present scenario, the success of any business can’t be imagined without the support of mobile apps. With digital disruption and mobilegeddon crashing 2019, the utility of travel apps is only going to increase more than ever. Building a long-term relationship with customers and providing experience each time they travel will undoubtedly boost revenue for the government.

If you are looking for mobile app development agency , or ios outsourcing development drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Customized Chatbot Solution?

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 05:10:57 +0000

Digitization has opened a plethora of opportunities for businesses. It has allowed them to expand at a higher pace, and hence cater to a wider audience. While initially, businesses were focussing on developing mobile applications, the year 2019 is the year of automation and artificial intelligence.

More than 80% of companies have planned or are already using a chatbot solution within their organizations. For those who are still planning or are confused amongst various types of chatbot solutions available, here is a comprehensive guide for different kinds of chatbots and the cost to develop a customized chatbot solution-

Ready-Made Solutions
If you are a startup or an enterprise ai chatbot agency with a tight budget, readymade bots are your best bet. Similar to the Play Store and App Store where you can find custom mobile applications, companies like Telegram and Kik have stored for readymade bot solutions.

There are also numerous companies such as ‘Botlist’ working in this domain who deliver ready-made solutions according to your enterprise’s needs.

Advantages

An inexpensive solution as you don’t need to pay costs of development etc.
You can try and test various bot solutions before finding the one suitable to you.

Disadvantage

No option of customization
No bot will meet 100% of your business needs

Templatized Solutions
Numerous self-service platforms offer you chatbot templates which you can later customize according to your needs. Platforms like Botmaker and Chatfuel, for example, provide users with 1000+ bot templates to choose from.

You can purchase a template and then customize and test it before finally deploying it within your enterprise. There are numerous similar third-party platforms (a comprehensive list of which you can find on this link) which not only allow bot creation but allow easy integration with apps like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Moreover, platforms like Chatfuel give you 100,000 free messages per month, which is sufficient for SMEs.

Advantages

Templatized solution is flexible and can be integrated into organizations of any type or size.
These solutions are inexpensive compared to readily made bots, and most platforms offer support as well as free messaging as part of the package.

Disadvantage

Costs here are variable given that they mostly depend on your business size and may increase in cases of MNCs.
Templates offer pre-defined functionalities and hence may not be able to suit 100% of your business requirements.

Customized Chatbot Solution, How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Customized Chatbot Solution?
Customized Chatbot Solution
If you have a budget at hand and are willing to offer your customers top-notch services, then a customized chatbot solution is something you should go for. Customized chatbot solutions though have an initial cost involved, they can be designed exactly as per your target audience requirements.

In case you are not proficient with coding and development you can hire a team of experts who can develop a chatbot for your enterprise.

Customized chatbot development generally follows the below-mentioned cycle. Knowing the development cycle of a chatbot will allow you to estimate the cost to develop a customized chatbot solution.

Development Phase

This phase is more of an ideation phase where business owners and the tech teamwork in synergy to identify the objective of a chatbot. During this phase questions such as the need for the chatbot, functions to automate, applications to integrate, etc. are answered.

Post this the method of development to be followed, timeline, etc. are decided. If things go well and data is present, the ideation phase roughly ends in 5-6 days.

Prototype Implementation

A prototype enables the business owners to check the basic functionality of a chatbot and is a feasibility test intended to verify the design and working of some critical features.

This phase allows for risk reduction, and can further help business owners implement and check if the bot they are developing is in line with their business plan.

This phase roughly costs $2000- $4000 varying from company to company.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Release

The MVP phase is generally the time when you as a business owner are required to launch a lighter version of your application to the general public for their feedback.

This helps you identify bugs and errors in your bot and hence allows you to fix this before integration and deployment. Once your MVP is launched, and beta test results are obtained, you can correct the errors and finally launch the bot.

Creation and launching of MVP generally cost you $10,000 – $15,000 depending on the team you hire as well as features your incorporate,

Continuous Learning and Development

The effectiveness of a chatbot depends upon the information it stores and later analyses. Hence more the chatbot interacts with the audiences, the better it becomes in solving their queries and problems. The learning phase is a never-ending cycle, and with time your bot will start growing smarter.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Customized Chatbot Solution?
Depending upon the company you approach the average cost of building a chatbot from scratch is around $10,000 – $15,000. The average becomes double, i.e. $30,000 if you are to visit the Silicon Valley companies for development.

The cost to develop a customized chatbot solution is directly influenced by the learning and processing power of your bot. The smart decision, in this case, is to make a basic bot that you can train over time and as your business expands so will the learning and understanding of your bot.

Choosing the right chatbot for your business is extremely important, given the solution will be directly interacting with your clientele. Your company’s decision-makers, as well as the chatbot solution developers, need to work closely in synergy if you are to come up with a solution that will help grow your company’s profit.

If you are looking for mobile app development , or ios outsourcing development , drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 05:06:29 +0000

Over the past decade, voice assistants have progressively entered our lives. Names like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana will surely ring a bell. But it was way before these names that the concept of a voice assistant was brought to light.

As far as back in 1962, IBM launched the first-ever voice assistant, named Shoebox. If you hadn’t guessed it, its size went by its name. It could do the mathematical functions and recognize digits 0-9 and 16 spoken words. Then came Harpy with a vocabulary of a three-year-old, it could recognize 1,011 words.

All of these initials innovations had paved a way for what was to come next. Apple, Amazon, Google, and other giants got their best brains on this, and the result was for the world to see!

Fast-forwarding to today, “Hey Siri”, “Alexa!”, “Okay, Google” is commonly known.

Alexa Skill Development, Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide
But out of all these, Alexa stands out for the masses. Being available on 100Mn devices, it has become the talk of the industry. And it isn’t just the Talking Tom with a speaker, it actually does your chores for you, and sometimes gets you like no one else.

Technically speaking, it uses AccuWeather to provide weather reports and news with a plethora of sources such as NPR, ESPN, and local radio stations.

It understands users’ needs for the beats and streams all of the rock, pop, and midnight melodies from the owner’s Amazon Music account, and offers built-in support for Spotify and Pandora accounts. It can manage the alarms and to-do lists in the way you want and also make important calls for you.

All these tasks Alexa does is through its built-in capabilities called “Skills”. Users can teach and inculcate new skills in Alexa using the Alexa Skills Kit, which can then be accessed by making requests or asking questions. You can create smart home skills, music skills, video skills, flash briefing skills, and custom skills as well.

It is a comprehensive device operating on the latest technology and does everything that you could expect from a voice assistant at the most.

In this guide, we’ll look at custom Alexa skill development, but before that,

“Alexa, what all should I know before building an Alexa-skill?”

Alexa Skill Development, Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide
The common (obvious) prerequisite to building any type of skill is an account on the Developer Console, which would be used to create the configuration for your skill.

The configuration would require the information about the skill, such as the name of the skill, the type of interaction model, the content feed or endpoint, and other information. This configuration is used to determine the user requests that should be sent to the Alexa service for your skill.

Tools to build a Custom Skill:

Thanks to mobile app development agency , You will need an internet-accessible endpoint to host the cloud-based service, Amazon Web Services(AWS) account, and Amazon developer account to use AWS Lambda, an appropriate developer environment, and an Alexa-enabled device for testing.

Tools to build a Smart-Home Skill:

You would need an account with AWS, an appropriate developer environment for your preferred programming language. You can use Node.js, Python, Java, C#, or Go to author a Lambda function. For testing, you must have an Alexa-enabled device.

Tools to build a Video Skill:

Building a Video Skill would require a cloud-enabled video service provider with a public API or access to the cloud-based service, an account with AWS, an Alexa-enabled device, and an appropriate developer environment for coding.

Tools to build a Flash-Briefing skill:

You will need a content feed that would be accessible via the Internet, using RSS or JSON, which would refresh with the new content.

Tools to build a Music skill:

For a music skill, you need to have an Amazon developer account, an Alexa-enabled device registered to it, an AWS account, a music service to stream music and a cloud API to control it.

“Alexa, how do I make you work?”

Alexa could be requested for telling the horoscope in two ways, one is,

Alexa, ask Horoscopes Today for the horoscope for Pisces.” where the sample utterances are matched with the invocation, the other is:

“Alexa, what is my horoscope?”, where an Alexa custom skill is indirectly invoked.

It is all a simple play of intents and utterances, your sample utterances should match the invocations you use to ask questions or request Alexa.

The invocation name is combined with a command, action or question which further sends an “IntentRequest” with the intent corresponding the user’s requests. The command, action, or question in your invocation phrase is defined in the sample utterances and mapped to the intents.

Times may come when the users would want Alexa to just get whatever they are saying, to ease the exasperation that may result, provide a plethora of sample utterances written in various forms.

Also, who would not want to get their personalized playlist listed beside every mood that a day could encounter. Alexa can stream music and media as you ask it to. Once the Alexa device is registered to the user’s Amazon account, they can request any track from their fully-accessible Amazon Music Library.

“Alexa, what are your Technical Aspects?”

What are the technicalities to keep in mind?

Now, there should be no ambiguity in the answer to this question. The job here is to create a cloud-based service to handle the request for the skills and host it in the cloud.

To build a custom skill, the AWS Lambda function is used. An alternative to this is writing a web service (in any language), in which case the web service would respond to the request sent by Alexa.

An Interaction Model is defined when creating a custom skill. It is used by Alexa to fetch the words from the voice and translate them into a request, which is then sent to a particular skill.

The other skill types have their APIs which provide a built-in interaction model.

“Alexa, how do I build a Skill?”

The skill-building process is organized on the Developer Console in a systematic way from creating a skill on the Build page to testing and analyzing it.

Building a Skill:
On the Build Page of the Developer Console, perform the setup and configuration of the skill. Specify the corresponding interaction model and the endpoints for the service. All these options are easily available on the Developer Console.

However, it depends on the model of the skill that what specific options should be used here. For a custom model, intents and sample utterances are created. For pre-built smart home models, an endpoint is specified and account linking configuration is performed.

Testing a Skill:
A skill could be tested in multiple ways. Utterance Profiler is used to test the custom interaction model.

On the Test page of the Developer Console, there is a simulator that gives access to the Alexa Skill development Kit features, and it is used for testing the skills. Another option is to test using an Alexa-enabled device.

The skill can also be tested from the command-line using ASK CLI commands.

Or else, Skill management API provides the skill-testing features for the same.

Previewing a Skill:
The Distribution page on the Developer Console is used to determine the availability of the skill and have a glance at how it would appear when viewed in the Skill Store.

The metadata used here is language-specific. The details are required to be filled in each language supported by the skill. This data would then be displayed on the skill detail page accessible in the skill store.

Verifying a Skill:
On the Certification page, verify that your skill is all ready and submit it for the certification process. The publication status of the skill will be displayed on the Status column of the Developer Console.

Once the skill is published, the publication status changes to live. Here, the skill can also be hidden or removed.

If there are any certification failures or issues, then they are fixed for successful validation and certification.

Analyzing a Skill:
The Analytics page on the Developer Console is used to view the usage metrics for a skill. This dashboard depicts detailed information about how the customers are using the skill.

The present demand of the Voice Assistants has made it clear that they are changing the lifestyle of the people for good. It has been analyzed that the people who do not own a smart voice assistant desire to purchase one.

It is anticipated that the voice assistants would be made so smart that on your slightest whisper of “Alexa, I’m hungry”, it will automatically order your most favored cuisine.

AI has the capabilities that will help the smart speakers to think and learn by themselves without being programmed for every other intent. Artificial Intelligence is going to be the market leader and Voice Assistants, being a product of it, and always learning and improving, aren’t going anywhere. The Voice Assistants are here to grow and stay.

Now, if you’re looking for Alexa skill development for your company, make sure you hire a professional team and avoid any last-minute hassles. It’ll not only help you improve your customer services, but also help you save your time while placing you ahead of your competitors.

If you are looking for mobile app development , or ios outsourcing development drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

Five Things to Check before Opting for a Chatbot Solution

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 05:00:14 +0000

If there’s something everyone is raving about today, it is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Businesses and companies across all parallels of the industry are increasingly relying on the power of these two pioneering technologies and rightly so. Powered by AI and ML, enterprises are able to achieve such things today that were earlier considered to be the food for imagination!

One such incredible tool is a Chatbot.

Powered by AI, a enterprise ai chatbot agency is a software/program that is specifically designed to communicate and interact with humans in their natural language. They can engage with humans quite naturally and respond to them using mediums such as SMS, messaging services, and chat windows across websites and a host of social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and much more.

So, how can Chatbot create and add value to your business?

The answer is simple – by increasing the customer/client interaction quotient with your brand/organization.

When you start using Chatbots, you’re opening the window for customer interaction, thereby allowing you to understand the pain points of your existing customers as well as a potential target audience.

Chatbots – How they came into being and their evolution
Although Chatbots are the hot topic of discussion at present, their existence goes long back.

It was way back in 1966 that Joseph Weizenbaum developed what came to be known as the first chatbot – ELIZA. This chatbot was unique in the sense that it could imitate the language and behavior of a psychotherapist and interact with humans just as a psychotherapist would. After ELIZA, came PARRY in 1972. Both ELIZA and PARRY could only interact and respond to human queries or statements through textual commands and scripted responses.

Years later, Rollo Carpenter developed the first voice-operated chatbot in 1988 – came to the scene in 1988 – Jabberwacky project.

With the passage of time, Chatbots continued to get smarter and more intelligent (for instance, A.L.I.C.E and SmarterChild).

Cut to this day, we have access to some of the most intelligent Chatbots you can think of! Siri, Alexa, Watson, Cortana, Google Now – these Chatbots are used by individuals and businesses all over the world.

How can Chatbots help add value to your business?
The biggest advantage of Chatbots, as we mentioned before, is that it boosts customer interaction with your brand. By deploying chatbots in your company website would allow customers to make and maintain a meaningful conversation with you 24×7. Your customers will know that they can have any and every information about your brand whenever they want it. Another catch for your business – you will not have to splurge a ton of money in maintaining an army of professionals to man the customer support system. All in all, it makes customer support and service smooth and seamless.

And the craze of Chatbots is catching on pretty fast.

According to Gartner, by 2020, nearly 25% of customer service and support operations will incorporate chatbot technology across various engagement channels (this number stood at just 2% in 2017). Then again, Orbis Research predicts that the global chatbot market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 37.11% between 2017-20. And speaking of trimming down business costs, Juniper Research predicts that by 2022, Chatbots will reduce business costs by nearly US$ 8 billion!

Now comes the question of the hour – What to look for in a Chatbot?
While there is a wide range of advanced Chatbots out there, it is essential to find the perfect match for your business. This is where the features of Chatbots come to play. Here are five features that you must look for when choosing a Chatbot:

Built-in NLP (Natural Language Processing) support

The first thing to keep in mind is that whether or not a Chatbot harbors the basic support system for natural language processing. You must check for things like how many languages can the bot support, whether or not it can engage in inappropriate conversations and maintain the same through text or speech, and so on. When a Chatbot features built-in NLP support, it can understand and interpret user queries/statements and the intent behind them, and reply accordingly.

Dialog flow design

A good Chatbot is one that allows you to customize and design the dialog flow, that is, maintaining a conversational framework. It should be such that it allows you to define and delineate distinct conversation paths. Also, the bot should feature exception handling capability.

Channel/medium agnostic

A Chatbot should be able to function seamlessly in multiple platforms, be it mobile apps, or websites, or social media platforms like Facebook. Furthermore, it should be able to interact with tools like Skype, Slack, etc. As such, you could deploy a single bot on multiple platforms and harness its full potential.

API driven

An efficient Chatbot would allow you to perform backend integration tasks with ease. It should either let you invoke APIs or it should offer an easy integration method combined with both SDK and platform configuration. So, make sure you check whether or not the bot allows you to invoke APIs easily and connect to various backends from the dialog flow and also the platform test support.

Easy to update and faster in production

The next thing to look out for in a Chatbot is whether or not it is easy to update. That is, if it allows you to smoothly introduce new dialog flows within your conversation model, or if it allows you to update and incorporate new utterances to existing intents, among other things. Another thing to keep in mind is that a Chatbot should run faster in production (for that is the whole point of leveraging AI).

Conclusion

With technology advancing to new arenas as we speak, there’s definitely more to expect from Chatbots in the years to come. Ever since their birth, Chatbots have come a long way and have today, become somewhat an indispensable part of our daily life. It may not be long before we get to see much more exceptional and advanced bots than Alexa, Siri, or Cortana. To conclude, the future looks promising and optimistic for Chatbots.

If you are looking for mobile app development , or ios outsourcing development drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

How Enterprises are Replacing Surveys with Chatbot Conversations?

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 04:53:26 +0000

The dawn of Data Science has made chatbots truly ubiquitous. Able to do tonnes of routine, and some not-so-routine tasks, they are being leveraged by big names in the industry including Spotify, Sephora, Mastercard, and more. In fact, there are nearly 3,00,000 active bots on Messenger making rounds today!

The craze for a chatbot is growing at an unprecedented pace. More and more businesses are joining the chatbot bandwagon to streamline their customer interaction and enhance their customer service. According to an Oracle survey, by 2020, nearly 80% of businesses will be both demanding and using chatbots.

While the enterprise ai chatbot agency that we interact with today are highly advanced and are programmed to respond by learning from experience, it wasn’t always so. The inception of the earliest chatbot dates way back to 1966.

It was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum and was called ELIZA. After ELIZA came PERRY, and as the years progressed, we’ve had many such early forms of chatbots such as Jabberwacky, A.L.I.C.E, and SmarterChild.

Since the 2000s, we’ve seen some real progress in chatbots and now we have some of the most sophisticated chatbots humankind has ever seen – IBM Watson, Siri, Google Now, Alexa, Cortana, and much more!

How does a chatbot function?
To put it in simple terms, a chatbot is a program designed to mimic the natural human language and interact with humans. They are powered by AI algorithms combined with NLP (natural language processing) which allows them to understand and simulate natural human languages.

Chatbots are primarily of two types – scripted chatbots and intelligent AI-powered chatbots.

Scripted chatbots, as the name suggests, can interact and engage with humans only in a pre-defined conversational flow. That is, if you ask a question to such as a bot, it can respond to you from a predefined set of answers fed in its library. In mobile app development agency, These chatbots are mostly used in tasks that require automation, for instance, logging feedback or tracking leads.

Contrary to scripted chatbots, AI-powered bots harness the power of NLP to interact with humans. They understand what humans speak/type and they provide the most befitting answer to whatever query you may have.

These bots learn from every human interaction they encounter and hence, with time, they only get smarter. Siri, Alexa, Cortana are all intelligent chatbots.

The chatbot benefit
The reasons for adopting a chatbot are many. One of the most striking features of a chatbot is that businesses can always stay connected to their customers, almost in real-time. And if done correctly, chatbots can help take businesses to new heights in no time.

Let’s talk about the three key benefits that chatbots offer. First, they are available 24×7. So, no matter when a customer wants to connect with a particular brand, the chatbot will be at his/her service.

Second, chatbots aren’t designed to make mistakes. While it is possible for human customer support personnel to make minor errors (it is only human to make mistakes!) when handling customer requests/queries, chatbots are programmed to always provide the most accurate answers.

Third, chatbots can help save both time and money. Since they have prompt and speedy delivery, customers never have to wait for their queries/requests to be addressed. Also, companies get the opportunity to cut back on the manpower otherwise required to handle customer support. Thus, they help trim down business costs and save a ton of money!

Why take the chatbot route?
With an array of benefits that chatbots have to offer, businesses should no longer stick to the traditional methods of conducting customer surveys.

When it comes to understanding customers (both existing and potential), there can be nothing better than chatbots – mainly because chatbots believe in a pre-emptive approach.

One of the best features of chatbots has to be their ability to take pre-emptive actions. By doing so, they transform the entire customer service game. Customers usually hover cluelessly around websites with no one to guide them around.

This is where chatbots come in. They can make customers feel welcome by greeting them with warm welcome messages/audio and quickly engaging them in a conversation.

Through a series of basic questions, chatbots can gather the required information about an individual customer and understand the persona they are dealing with and thereby, guide them accordingly. With this proactive approach, customers never feel neglected and left out.

Chatbots help minimize bounce rates

Nobody likes filling out lengthy forms, be it online or on paper. Most people quit filling out forms by the time they reach the second page, mainly because they find it boring and time-consuming. But how about a conversation that can help businesses score all the points (valuable customer data) they need?

, How Enterprises are Replacing Surveys with Chatbot Conversations?
With their excellent conversational power, chatbots can keep customers engaged in meaningful and natural conversation for a long time. Since chatbots simulate natural human language and interact with humans just as another human would do, customers find themselves at ease and continue the conversation.

As a result, it is easier for chatbots to harness the information business want from their customers. Also, they can extend the conversation to obtain more information. Overall, this helps minimize and mitigate bounce rates significantly.

Chatbots provide something that web forms/paper forms do not offer – answer buttons

Chatbots do not work like traditional survey forms, i.e., they don’t require your customers to go through the tedious process of filling the various fields of a form. Instead, these bots provide multiple, predefined and alternate suggestions/options in the form of answer buttons.

To proceed through the process, one is only required to click the buttons. It is that simple. No lengthy sentences or descriptions needed. In this manner, chatbots obtain all kinds of relevant information about a customer without letting him/her feel exhausted in the process.

Chatbot come with cross-channel power

Usually, in the traditional approach, survey forms are situated in a particular page of a website. So, if a business would want customers to fill out the survey forms, it would have to redirect them to that location. In the process, it is quite natural to lose customers as they tend to lose interest.

With a chatbot, this can be avoided. Chatbots are flexible, as in, they allow businesses to dive in wherever potential customers are (thanks to multi-channel capability).

Chatbots can be integrated with messenger apps, mobile messages, emails, social networking sites, and not to forget, the company website. This reduces the chances of businesses losing potential customers.

Chatbot gets ‘feedback.’

, How Enterprises are Replacing Surveys with Chatbot Conversations?
Customer feedback is immensely important for businesses, especially with so many able competitors around. Chatbots help you get it.

While feedback forms can get monotonous and hefty, chatbots help obtain customer feedback by engaging in conversation with customers, asking responsive questions, and offering positive persuasion to customers to provide their valuable feedback.

These points clearly bring to light the advantages that chatbots have over traditional surveying methods. Ever since their inception, chatbots have displayed the immense capability to interact and converse with humans and are continuing to do so.

In the future, too, chatbots will keep providing undivided attention and support to customers, and it’ll only get better with time.

If you are looking for mobile app development , drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

Chatbot: The Best Tool for Customer Surveys??

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 04:45:24 +0000

Undoubtedly, if a business wants to strive today, its focus cannot solely be on profit maximization but also on customer satisfaction. This is the mantra of the modern age business world. And by now, every active netizen must have encountered the new-age tools that have taken customer support to another level.

We’re talking about Live Chats and Chatbots.
While most of us have interacted with both of these mediums, not many are able to tell whether they are interacting with a live chat tool or a chatbot. There’s a major difference between these two tools. While a enterprise ai chatbot agency is a robot designed to communicate with humans by mimicking natural human languages, in a live chat tool, one is essentially conversing with a human sitting on the other side of the screen.

Yes, the point of difference is that very simple.

Today, businesses and organizations around the world are using these two powerful tools to engage in real-time conversation with customers (both existing and potential customers) & it is nothing less than surprising how these little tools have helped to add value to businesses by giving a significant boost to their customer satisfaction quotient.

Econsultancy maintains that nearly 79% of consumers prefer live chat features as it reduces the wait time and they can readily get solutions to their problems. Also, according to the Zendesk Benchmark report, live chat prevails over traditional means of customer support (telephone, emails, web forms, etc.) with a 92% customer satisfaction rate.

Source: acquire.io

However, while live chat features are great, they are still lagging behind when compared to chatbots. The primary advantage being, chatbots are available 24×7 whereas, in live chat features, the human person handling the tool may or may not be available when you are in need of assistance.

Since chatbot can respond to customer queries/requests either through a predefined set of scripted answers or intelligent AI-powered learning experience, they can operate seamlessly without human assistance.

According to a recent survey, nearly 37% respondents answered that they would use chatbots for “getting a quick answer in an emergency” and 35% of them stated that they would use chatbots for “resolving a complaint or problem.”

Customer Survey Chatbot, Chatbot: The Best Tool for Customer Surveys??
Source: convinceandconvert

With AI technology taking over the world and transforming businesses, the case for chatbots is escalating rapidly.

Why Use a Chat Feature for your Business?
The answer to this question is really simple – because the modern day customer is no longer willing to wait. We live in a world where everything is fast paced, so why should customer-brand interaction be lagging behind?

Customers now want instant and real-time response to their queries/requests. If a business can address the grievances of its customers and respond to their queries/requests instantaneously, it is a hit with customers. Stats show that almost two-thirds of customers who engage with brands having a chat feature are more likely to return to their websites.

Both live chat and chatbots are great means to reduce the wait times. As mentioned earlier, live chat has drastically reduced the wait time for customers when compared to social media platforms and email.

Customer Survey Chatbot, Chatbot: The Best Tool for Customer Surveys??
Source: quicksprout

However, granted that live chat is speedy, it still cannot catch up with chatbots. This is because chatbots reply instantly. There’s hardly any wait time at all.

Owing to their fast and speedy delivery and versatility, chatbots are now taking over traditional survey methods.

Why are Chatbot Surveys the New Rave?
The entire purpose of a survey is to obtain valuable customer feedback that helps businesses understand the mindset of their customer base, their pain points, and their taste and preference patterns. While live chats and traditional survey methods are two good options for gaining customer feedback, they simply aren’t good enough – they cannot compete with the efficiency and speed of a chatbot.

When it comes to customer satisfaction (and customer survey likewise), there are three important things that a business must consider before choosing a tool:

What is its customer base like? (complete focus is on buyer personas)
How crucial is the response time for its customer base?
What is the quantity of resources that it is allocating for customer interaction?
Finding the answer to these three questions will solve the mystery altogether, that, is, which tool should a business use to understand its customers – customer surveys or live chat or chatbots?

For instance, if the customer base of a business is not highly differentiated and it is a unique provider of a product/service in the market, it won’t take much time and resources for the business to understand its customer base. And being a unique provider in the market, the business is aware that its customers are loyal to the brand. In such a situation, it can either opt for the traditional survey methods or a live chat.

But if your customer base is huge and varied and you have a lot of competitors in the market, the best course would be to choose a chatbot. Why? Because chatbots have cross-channel ability (they can work seamlessly on various kinds of platforms and hence allow a business to dive in where potential customers are). Furthermore, they can function without human assistance, so businesses wouldn’t have to spend a ton of money on human capital required to handle customer support system.

While traditional web/paper survey forms are lengthy and filling them can get overwhelming, in case of live chats, customers are almost always asked to provide their email address and other details before their queries are answered. All combined, makes a customer lose his/her interest in the process as a result of which they quit. The end result – businesses lose customers.

Chatbot has an edge over all the methods of a customer survey. First, they use a pre-emptive approach to get the customer’s attention. Second, they use myriad conversational techniques to keep the customer engaged in a lengthy and detailed conversation. Third, customers find it easier to complete a chatbot survey since all they have to do is click on answer buttons (no need to fill lengthy Q & A forms that go on forever). So, customers never feel the ‘respondent fatigue’ that usually accompanies while filling a lengthy survey form. The list could go on and on.

The bottom line is that, since chatbots are designed to interact and engage with customers in a very natural, human-like way, customers hardly feel that they are talking to a bot and not a human. With an array of interesting questions and smart features like answer buttons, chatbots make the entire process of customer surveys much more effective and efficient.

Due to these reasons, chatbot survey providers such as Snatchbot, Surveybot, and Acebot, to name a few, the customer survey game is changing for good. Businesses can now have all the information they want about their customer base within a matter of a few minutes, all thanks to chatbots. And at the pace chatbots are developing, it won’t be long before they can do so much more than just offer customer support and conduct hassle-free customer surveys.

If you are looking for mobile app development agency, drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com

How Technology Can Enhance Customer Experiences: A Travel Chatbot Use Case

Shrutinaagar38 — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 04:17:39 +0000

In the past few years, the focus of businesses has shifted from profit maximization to customer satisfaction, and rightly so.

With the rise of social media platforms, modern-day consumers have gotten a voice, or rather, a concrete platform to voice their opinions. And surely, no business would want their customers to put out their negative experience with brands on social media platforms for everyone to see!

According to the New Voice Media data, almost 59% of customers aged between 25-35 readily share their negative experiences online.

For any business – whether it be a for-profit or a non-profit enterprise, or whether it be a public or private enterprise – customer satisfaction is one among the many pivotal key performance indicators (KPIs) that have to be considered, monitored, and measured.

As such, customer satisfaction quotient indicates how well a business is serving its customers. Improving this singular factor can change the face of a business.

After all, a happy customer is a satisfied customer. It is a proven fact that happy and satisfied customers not only become loyal and repeat customers of a brand, but they also bring in new customers.

And as is true of everything in the business world today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have found their way into the domain of customer satisfaction.

The most excellent example of this being chatbots. From enhancing the entire process of customer support to transforming the process of customer surveys, chatbots are finding applications in various fields of business.

However, in this post, we’re going to focus on travel chatbots and how they are transforming the travel industry for the better.

Travel Chatbot and its Benefits
Software powered by AI and NLP, a chatbot is designed to simulate human speech and interact with humans in their natural languages. Chatbots can be developed and customized to suit the specific needs of a business. Since these bots are now the hottest trend in the industry, travel companies have also joined the game through Travel Bots.

Expedia maintains that while planning a trip, a traveler visits as many as 38 websites on an average. Not to forget the endless series of calls and interactions with travel agents and booking agencies.

All of this makes the process of planning a trip both time-consuming and overwhelming. This is where travel chatbot solutions come in.

Travel chatbot is personal assistant bearing both analytical and predictive capabilities. Furthermore, they are available 24×7, can interact in a plethora of human languages, and can respond to traveler queries and requests in real-time.

So, if you have a travel-related query, you can just ask a travel bot and the bot will answer your questions accurately, scourge the Internet to get you the best deals – basically, it will help you with anything you need.

A travel chatbot can help save a user’s time, help organize the trip, suggest places to visit, list the best deals available (travel tickets, accommodation, etc.), and much more.

Being excellent profiling tools, chatbots can help personalize the user experience by gathering relevant user data such as purchase history, travel preferences, etc.

Travel Chatbots – Success Stories
Travel Chatbot Solutions are already being leveraged by big names in the travel and hospitality industry such as Expedia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Ryanair, and Marriott, to name a few.

For instance, Expedia’s Facebook Messenger bot allows users to perform a streamlined search for hotels. All one needs to do is to open Facebook Messenger and provide the bot details about the travel plan.

After the bot has all the necessary information, it will list the five most popular and top-rated hotels in the users’ preferred choice of location.

And once the users click on any one of the five options, they will be redirected to Expedia’s site where they can directly book the hotel.

Then again, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ travel bot can support 13 languages. It uses Facebook Messenger’s checkbox plugin feature on the checkout page to provide travelers with the option of choosing to receive all travel updates including booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass, and flight status updates on Messenger itself.

Similarly, there’s another Facebook-based travel bot called Kayak that allows users to find the best hotel and flight deals via an instant messaging platform. Not just that, Kayak also offers beneficial travel advice to its users and updates them about their flight status.

Chatbot solutions help create a streamlined and smart communication channel between brands and users. Apart from this, they can automate the process of query/request handling, thereby allowing travel service providers to dedicate their human capital to other and more important tasks that need human interaction and effort.

Needless to mention, travel chatbots (just like any other chatbot) offer 24×7 customer support. So, customers no longer have to wait to get their travel issues and queries sorted.

This is just another example of how AI and chatbots are transforming the ways in which consumers are connecting and interacting with brands.

Thanks to AI, chatbot solutions are becoming increasingly smart and intelligent, so much so that they are becoming the trusted advisors of customers. And this is just the beginning, who knows what else chatbots will be able to do in the years to come!

If you are looking for mobile app development mobile app development or custom chatbot development, drop us a line at enterprise@affle.com