We met Stéphane Houin, a consulting director on emerging technologies and Head of the XP digital range for all banking and insurance operations at CGI, independent IT and business consulting services firm. 

Stéphane Houin is interested in exploring new ways of interacting with artificial intelligence technologies to create value and provide a network of high-performance partnerships.

Where do things stand with chatbots? 

After a disappointing initial wave of chatbot implementation, we have seen a real surge in ‘intelligent’ conversational agents over the past few months. These systems effectively interact with the company’s staff and clients via several media – not just messaging services – on the back of truly effective NLP (Natural Language Processing) solutions. They really support the development of augmented intelligence strategies, and rather than competing with human-based systems, they work alongside them. A new generation of chatbots has been emerging over recent months i.e. CallBots and other conversational agents that offer voice interaction. Voice is set to be used increasingly in human-machine interaction.          

How do voice assistants improve chatbot services? 

Personal voice assistants are a real opportunity for chatbots as they increase voice use and natural language interaction experiences in a personal use context, which helps users take on the technology and promotes the effectiveness of this system. Users of these systems then become increasingly skilled at using them and keen to adopt natural language interaction with chatbots and other conversational agents. These new interactions will help these technologies progress (particularly NLP), and also provide insight into what types of use should be offered, based on these solutions’ real capabilities: this will help avoid the disappointments that we have seen in the past.  

Will the future be full of augmented users with automated services? 

Not all services will be automated in the future, but a large number definitely will. We will have to carefully work out exactly what should be automated and how to support users on a daily basis to relieve them of repetitive actions where they have no added value, all with the ultimate aim of streamlining business and communication. We are at the start of a period of advanced automation and chatbots and other conversational agents will definitely be key to the success of this new era of intelligence.