AI Chatbots: Adding Personality to Your Business App

Your mobile app is an extension of your business – and it can be an excellent way to reduce the distance between you and your audience. 

We love websites. We think websites are an excellent investment to start your business with, but as useful as a website is, there can be a lot of distance between your brand and your consumers on a website, and if you’re a new business trying to make your mark in an industry against your competitors, this little bit of distance can feel like you’re trying to get home during rush hour: you’ll get there at some point, but when is out of your hands.

Enter: the mobile app. Mobile apps are versatile, and any business, no matter what they do, can have a mobile app. You can customize the way it’s designed to extend your brand outwards, pushing it farther than you can on a website, and you can add in features that you might not be able to code into a website, such as tying your offers to location, or varying the experience you get when you open up the app. 

And you can personalize your app so it sounds like your brand is talking directly to your consumers through chatbots and voice assistants.

Chatbots are an excellent tool for any business to use. One of the biggest time-sinks for employees is answering the same few questions over and over again, and a chatbot will specifically address that concern by having responses tailored to those questions. Similarly, in a mobile app, chatbots function in a very similar way – not only will your app be a lot easier to navigate, it’ll probably be easier to keep your consumer interested in using your app or business if their every question is answered immediately. 

Here are some other benefits that come with implementing a chatbot or voice assistant to your business app. 

Excellent user experience

No business is working in a vacuum, and most businesses have to deal with competitors that are based all around the world.  What usually will set an organization apart is superb customer service, something that people will take to their friends and talk about broadly. 

Here’s the thing: customers will always have questions about your services, and being able to provide those answers rapidly is one facet of excellent customer service – but it’s not necessarily going to be the moment of truth for your consumers. 

Programmed personality

Chatbots and voice assistants can address your consumer in a way that seems human, even if really all they’re doing is repeating a set of answers preloaded into the bot itself. While AI-enabled chatbots are still in the early stages of development, and so are a little unpredictable, what’s available is already very usable and offers a lot of opportunities to get creative. 

Here’s how chatbots can sound human. 

Think of the way that people talk: we tend to pause, to clarify whether or not someone’s listening to us or understanding us, we make jokes, we go off topic. Conversational AIs trained on large amounts of data sets can do the same thing, and these little aspects make an AI bot sound friendly and approachable. These bots already exist: Claude.AI, Google’s Duplex, and Replika are all chat bots trained on dialogic datasets. 

There’s a key difference between these kinds of chatbots and traditional chatbots, and it’s this: they won’t have responses hard-coded into them. Instead, these chatbots are trained on machine data to recognise and learn the way humans speak, and then to mimic that in their responses. 

Bots like this won’t answer the same way all the time: they’ll vary the way they approach a question, a lot like a human customer care agent will. They can hold a limited conversation outside of their responses; they can make jokes, admit when they don’t know something, and clarify or correct themselves.

It’s worth remembering that chatbots that aren’t powered by AI do none of those things. A chatbot that is simply programmed to answer as many questions as possible with the same responses isn’t programmed the same way as a chatbot powered by AI, who was given a personality by its creators, trained on data taken off of social media. 

Faster service

Imagine speaking to a representative of any business that has the answers already loaded, and knows precisely what you want. They’re friendly, efficient, and add your products as you go along. This has two benefits: one, it’ll help your customers check out faster, which means that they’ll likely purchase a little bit more at the outset. Leave them to add things to cart and wait, and the chances are that they will abandon some of those products. Secondly, a friendly chatbot can bridge the distance between the company and your consumer, and give them a tangible personality to speak to – and might be inclined to spend more if it’s coming from a friendly voice, rather than a sometimes-impersonal business website.

Personalized selections

Another fantastic thing about chatbots? They can monitor user intent and only show products that are sure to inspire interest in your consumers, regardless of whether or not those consumers are looking to purchase – something that can very easily push your consumers into deciding to buy after all! 

Businesses today have a lot to contend with, and a lot of it is outside of their control: they can’t remove all competition, or make their product number one through sheer force of will, and there will always be consumers who might prefer someone else’s goods over their own, but they can tailor their experience of the brand to be entirely 100% different from any other’s, and add a personal touch that can guide consumers the way they want them to go: purchasing products. 

If you want to add a voice assistant or a chatbot to your app, but you don’t know where to start, drop us a line, and let’s see how we can help you.