VOICE BASED INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE FOR WINDOWS

ABSTRACT

An AI personal assistant is a piece of software that can perform tasks for a user based on verbal or written commands. This software can perform tasks such as providing online customer service, sales and marketing massages which would have been carried out by human assignment. This thesis presents a customer service chat application: online customer service application. Its purpose is to provide online chat with website visitors in real time, independent of the location. We examine the functional requirements of such an application. The requirements are: interactivity, enhancing customer relationships and satisfaction, good quality and fulfilling a need. There are different types of AI assistants such as Siri, Alexa, livezhat and Google Assistant, etc. but in this work we focusing on artificial intelligence assistant. The application is communicating with customers to provide notifications and enable effective communication.
The main aim of the work is to design a voice based intelligent virtual assistant for windows  to provide online customer service, sales and marketing messages [which would have been carried out by human beings] using programs that help simulate interactions with customers automatically based on a set of predefined conditions, triggers, and/or event.

 

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1  Background

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term for computer software consisting of a complex mathematical algorithm that processes input information to produce any specific pre-defined outputs, which lead to relevant outcomes (Tom Nadarzynski et al 2019). Artificial intelligence is now at its peak and voice based virtual assistant technology is just one example of its use to contribute to progress (Strong 2016).

An AI personal assistant is a piece of software that can perform tasks for a user based on verbal or written commands. This software can perform tasks such as providing online customer service, sales and marketing massages which would have been carried out by human assignment. This thesis presents a customer service chat application: online customer service application. Its purpose is to provide online chat with website visitors in real time, independent of the location. We examine the functional requirements of such an application. The requirements are: interactivity, enhancing customer relationships and satisfaction, good quality and fulfilling a need. There are different types of AI assistants such as Siri, Alexa, livezhat and Google Assistant, etc.

Today the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can organize a natural human-machine interaction (through voice, communication, gestures, facial expressions, etc.) are gaining in popularity. One of the most studied and popular was the direction of interaction, based on the understanding of the machine by the machine of the natural human language. It is no longer a human who learns to communicate with a machine, but a machine learns to communicate with a human, exploring his actions, habits, behaviour and trying to become his personalized assistant.

Virtual assistants are software programs that help you ease your day to day tasks, such as showing weather reports, creating remainders, making shopping lists etc. They can take commands via text (online chatbots) or by voice. Voice-based intelligent assistants need an invoking word or wake word to activate the listener, followed by the command. We have so many virtual assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana. This system is designed to be used efficiently on desktops. Personal assistants software improves user productivity by managing routine tasks of the user and by providing information from an online source to the user.

• Problem Statement

Most of us prefer to speak to a real person when we call support and we cringe when someone tries to pass off an automated email as if it were personally sent. Automation and artificial intelligence can’t replace a real person manning a help desk, phone, or live chat. We are decades away from matching a human’s ability to perceive, judge, and react to complex situations in a caring, helpful way. Hence, this research intends to develop a Voice based intelligent virtual assistant for Windows.

1.3 Research Objectives    

The main objective of this study was to design and implement a Artificial Intelligence Voice based intelligent virtual assistant  System. The study aimed to gather requirements for the design and development of an interactive  system for windows. Other objectives include:

1. To Set up conversations for different events, such as new user on boarding.
2. To define tasks to automate your sales and marketing process.
3. Teach your bot to communicate with pre-defined content based on statements, keywords and other settings.
4. To send the exact resource that walks the customer through tackling the specific problem they are dealing with.

 

 

1.4  Scope of the Study 

The study focused on the design of  a Voice based intelligent virtual assistant for Windows. The designed system was limited to decision making. It was programmed in a way that it only knows what it was taught. The system has a feature for human handover which was left for decision making.

The designed system had the answers to the queries which are available in the system only, it cannot research for new topics on the web unless it is trained.

1.5 Significance of the Study    

Human support is (generally) passive or reactive. It relies on the customer taking the initiative to make the first contact or search through help documents.

The propose system will  help provide better service. It will  provide a degree of responsiveness that isn’t humanly possible.For instance, you can’t have someone monitoring all your site traffic or in-app activity for indicators of distress, but an automated system can “see” signs of trouble in a nearly unlimited amount of data and “react” in real-time.

Additionally, the study will provide the opportunity to monitor and anticipate customer behaviour more closely since the conversations between them and the user can be analysed more extensively.

With regard to the knowledge gap in the area, the findings of the study contributed to widening the experience of voice based virtual assistant technology adopting.

• Limitations of the Study

The creation and implementation of voiced based virtual assistant technology is still a developing area, heavily related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, so the provided solutions, while possessing obvious advantages, have some important limitations in terms of functionalities and use cases. However this is changing over time.
The most common ones are listed below:

As the database, used for output generation, is fixed and limited, virtual assistant can fail while dealing with an unsaved query.

Virtual assistant technology efficiency highly depends on language processing and is limited because of irregularities, such as accents and mistakes that can create an important barrier for international and multi-cultural organisation.

Sometimes, virtual assistant technology are unable to deal with multiple questions at the same time and so conversation opportunities are limited.

As it happens usually with technology-led changes in existing services, some consumers, more often than not from the old generation, are uncomfortable  due to their limited understanding, making it obvious that their requests are being dealt machines.

1.9 Definition of Key Terms and Concepts 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are designed for include: Speech recognition, Learning, Planning, Problem-solving (Techopedia, 2015).

Machine Learning 

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. It is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it to learn and train themselves.

In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a IVAstly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so perIVAsive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level A.I (Sytems, 2014).

 

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics, in its pursuit to fill the gap between human communication and computer understanding (Sadiq, 2016).

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics, in its pursuit to fill the gap between human communication and computer understanding (Sadiq, 2016).

VOICE BASED INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE FOR WINDOWS

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