The Rise of Conversation Intelligence

First of all, what is conversation intelligence?

Every day we have a lot of conversations with customers, coworkers, business partners, and etc. There is a lot of valuable information hidden in those conversations. Conversation intelligence refers to the technologies that analyze human conversations and provide actionable insights.

From a technology stack point of view, it contains a few major components, including Conversation Capturing, Voice Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, and etc.

Is Conversation Intelligence the same as Chatbot?

The short answer is no, even though CI and chatbots use many similar technologies. Chatbots focus on real-time human and machine interactions. For example, when you call customer service, you may hear a computer voice giving you instructions based on what you say. Or, when you talk to Siri, it helps you open your TV based on your instruction.

In contrast, CI focuses more on analyzing large volume conversation data to generate insights, for example, customer pain points, user requirement, market trend, and etc.

How about AI? Opaque AI vs Transparent AI?

Everyone knows AI. Conversation Intelligence Industry for sure uses AI. There are two kinds of AI. Opaque AI and Transparent AI. Let’s be a little bit technical here.

Opaque AI is also called Black Box AI. It is often associated with deep learning. Engineers need to do a lot of labeling on the data and use deep learning algorithms to train the model. Once the model achieves a certain level of confidence, we put it into usage and send new data into the model. The model will generate certain results on its own, and humans have not much control over its results.

In contrast, Transparent AI is also called White Box AI. It uses structured data and pre-define certain algorithms to process the data. As a result, humans have absolute control over the results. In other words, all possible outcomes are known ahead of time because it relies on human engineers to map inputs to the right output. Almost all conversation intelligence software is using transparent AI because it is more predictable and reliable.

If the two paragraphs above sound too technical to you, we can put in a simple way: Black box AI is the frontline of academic research. White Box AI gives humans more control and the outcome is more controllable and predictable. As a result, most conversation intelligence software uses this white box AI approach. Essentially, engineers set certain rules, like keywords, for the software to analyze conversations.

What Are The Use Cases? Is Conversation Intelligence Only For Sales Calls?

In the past 5 years, conversation intelligence is well known in analyzing sales calls, to provide insights about potential customers. For example, a sales manager may have tons of calls with potential customers, but as soon as you hang up the phone, all the valuable information during the call may be lost. Even if you manage to write the key information down once, after a lot of meetings, it becomes super challenging to keep track of all the conversations and get insights. Conversation Intelligence solves this problem. It captures all the conversations, transcribes, and generates insights from tons of conversations.

Because of the early success of analyzing sales calls, some people even consider conversation intelligence equal to sales call intelligence. However, conversation intelligence can be used in many industries. Our meeting assistant, Laxis, can assist you in different kinds of industries, including UX research, market research, recruiting, customer service and anywhere a lot of conversations happen and conversation insights are needed.

The common features of CI software are conversation recording, real time transcription, memo generation, insight management, search, edit, and share.

Why Has Conversation Intelligence Become So Hot Recently?

Conversation intelligence emerged around 2016 because of technology advancement in the voice recognition space. However, adoption of conversation intelligence grew very slowly in the past 5 years until 2020 when COVID pushed everyone into a remote working environment. All of a sudden, people’s daily conversations are all moved online, through phone calls or online conferences. A lot more conversations are recorded, which makes it much easier to analyze all those conversations. This gives a super boost to conversation intelligence.

Now the vaccine is available, and hopefully we will eliminate COVID in the next 6 months. Will the popularity of conversation intelligence wane down? The answer is no. Unlike a few years ago, now both businesses and consumers have noticed the value of conversation intelligence. The adoption of conversation intelligence will keep growing not just in the sales vertical, but in many other areas.

Laxis is well positioned as a leader in conversation intelligence. With advanced Natural Language Processing Technology, we provide a comprehensive software to assist you anywhere, anytime. Laxis captures every conversation for you wherever it happens and generates real-time meeting transcriptions. Laxis saves meeting notes in one place for you and they are searchable and editable. Laxis highlights meeting points, analyzes patterns and uncovers insights ready for your use. Please check out our home page and learn more about Laxis.