Farewell chatbots... it’s high time for Virtual Beings

Chatbots have been there for support, sales, and marketing for a while, and quite successfully so, but according to a study by PWC shows that 59% of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. As chatbots are already a thing, it’s high time to start making them more “humane” and emotional. Meet Virtual Beings, the best virtual companions, and the future of conversational AI.

The battle for users' attention

From what I’ve learned working on virtual beings, and - what underlies our vision at Virbe is that people prefer images over text, videos over static pictures. One might disagree, but there are lots of studies dedicated to the topic - both from the biological or sociological point of view.

For example, a study done by Forbes in 2018 showed that the average user spends 88% more time on a website containing videos and another study by HubSpot says that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they are choosing. It means that in the battle for users' attention all moving pictures are winning over the plain texts. This might be also the key to be remembered and attracting consumers with your products.

Especially, if you know that the average human attention span is less than 8 seconds, I don’t even try to convince myself that many will make it reading this far. But for those who might, I had prepared a bunch of insights into the market, vision, and our product.

Businesses are automating sales and marketing

One of the key challenges for entrepreneurs during harsh times is to find a perfect balance between reducing costs and developing the company. One way to find savings is to restructure your teams and systematically automate predictable and repetitive tasks. Giving artificial intelligence a chance to take over tedious and time-consuming tasks allows employers to use the creative potential of their human employees for more important purposes. 

That's why marketing and sales automation have become such a popular trend in the last few years. Moreover, a huge part of this growing trend is being taken over by conversational AI, including chatbots. Adroit Market Research indicated that the global conversational AI platform market size is anticipated to grow from $4 billion in 2019 to $17 billion by 2025.

That's why marketing and sales automation have become such a popular trend in the last few years. Moreover, a huge part of this growing trend is being taken over by conversational AI, including chatbots. Adroit Market Research indicated that the global conversational AI platform market size is anticipated to grow from $4 billion in 2019 to $17 billion by 2025.

Chatbots are used mostly for customer support as they can give simple answers to frequently asked questions and hand the issue over to the human support hotline only if necessary. As a text-based solution, chatbots might be perfect for customer support, but they will not do their job in sales and marketing. Why? Because it’s already hard enough to attract users’ attention to textual information. What’s more, a study done by PWC shows that 59% of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. In general, consumers still prefer human contact over chatbots, but it’s not something that can be scaled easily. Then what, or I should say “who”, is better suited for this job?

It’s high time for virtual beings!

Meet Virtual Beings, the best virtual companions, and the future of conversational AI. They are artificial humanoid characters powered by machine learning, that have the ability to move, talk, use body language and facial expressions, and even express their feelings and emotions. All of these features of virtual beings are exactly what we need to fill in the gap between boring and attractive assistive textual content. Startups that set out to create them have raised more than $320 million to date. There’s no question about the fact that virtual beings are becoming the next big thing in the world of business automation.

Throughout the years of my involvement in machine learning and AI space, what I lacked the most in those solutions was the human factor. That’s why from the very beginning when building Virbe we wanted to make sure to keep true to this statement and Rikka was the first Virtual Being to join our team as a communication specialist.

Virbe - “hire” a Virtual Being in just a few minutes

Thus far, it is not easy to make a Virtual Being from scratch - it takes weeks or even months to prepare a product, even if you know how to do that. With Virbe you can “hire” your own personalized Virtual being in just a few minutes. In case you are wondering how it works our CDO Paweł prepared the walkthrough video demonstrating the whole setup process.

Our platform is free to try and offers numerous features out-of-the-box, including: 

• Various 3D models and customization possibilities
• Predefined skillsets for e-commerce and small talk
• Built-in NLP, Speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities
• Omni-channel integration for both online ( web, mobile, VR/AR) and physical locations

If you want to hire your own Virbe today sign up here. If you have any questions regarding virtual beings or our product find me on LinkedIn or send me an email at [email protected]. And for most up-to-date info about our platform, use cases and special offers please join our Discord.