AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistants have been in the market ever since Facebook Messenger
opened up their API, which allowed for the creation of chatbots. These chatbots interact with
users via simple texts and build up a conversation. However, when you start developing a
chatbot, you realize how difficult it is.
There are many AIs and APIs that support chatbots’ creation, but fine-tuning them to your
purpose is difficult and time-consuming. With the iPhone, a basic chatbot was introduced that sends a notification, which is a one-way communication with the user. But, over the years, chatbots have advanced to the extent where they can perform entire conversations with users.
AI Assistants and Rasa
An AI assistant or virtual assistant is a program that can understand human language and
commands, and perform the corresponding functions. These assistants can also respond via
texts or audio. The Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Siri are examples of popular AI
assistants.
Rasa is an open-source framework for developing AI assistants. They invest in extensive
research that helps to create conversational AI. Developers make use of their cutting edge
Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the messages, determine the intent, and
capture the required information.
Dr. Alan Nichol and Alex Weidauer co-founded Rasa. They quickly realized that most AI
assistants and chatbots don’t perform well. Even those that work perfectly are built by a small group of people with machine learning expertise and access to significant resources. This is where Rasa comes in.
Rasa aims to help everyone make use of AI technology and build their own AI assistants so that they never have to use off-the-shelf AI tools by big companies.
The AI assistants built on Rasa can hold meaningful conversations with users, with multi-step
conversations that can remember the context and even integrate business logic. These
assistants are quite flexible and can be deployed on any platform, be it private cloud, on-
premises, or even a third-party cloud provider. They also can be connected to various existing systems, APIs, and knowledge bases.
Rasa is quite popular and trusted by leading companies worldwide. This is mainly because of
their increased security, HIPAA compliance and data privacy.
According to Rasa, chatbots can handle only basic questions and FAQs. Contextual Assistants are at the next level, and this allows for end-to-end automated conversations.
Let’s have a look at various levels of AI assistants.
5 Levels of AI Assistants
There are five levels of AI Assistants, and these are inspired by the autonomous vehicle.
1. Notifications
2. Chatbots
3. Contextual Assistants
4. Personalized Assistants
5. Autonomous Organization
1. Notifications
These are the most basic type of assistants that provide one-way communication with
the user via notifications. This was first observed in the Apple iPhone and quickly spread
to other devices and platforms. It could show up on a messaging application on your
device.
2. Chatbots
Chatbots are the most commonly available assistants in the market. By simple Natural
Language Understanding, these assistants can respond to customers and also facilitate
FAQs.
3. Contextual Assistants
Contextual Assistants are not easy to develop. With just NLU, you cannot develop these
assistants as you need to predict what happens next in the conversation. You do need to
understand what the user is conveying, however, you also need to focus on dialogue
management.
The context here refers to the context of the conversation and understanding this can
be key to a conversation for the assistant.
Rasa focuses on contextual assistants and makes use of deep learning and merges it
with business logic.
For implementing a contextual assistant, you require a whole team.
4. Personalized Assistants
A personalized assistant knows the user’s preferences, habits and choices and provides
suggestions or recommendations based on these.
5. Autonomous Organization
An autonomous organization is where an entire company functions on various AI
assistants. As a company, your customer service department might already be using an
AI assistant, this can be extended to include marketing, sales, and more. This is quite
complicated to implement and might be possible in the future.
Conclusion
Level 3 or Contextual Assistants are already being implemented with Rasa and other open-
source tools. But the higher levels are even more difficult to implement and may require
further technological development.
The 5 levels of AI assistants are useful for businesses as well as customers. It makes business
processes easier while improving customer engagement.
You can check out Rasa and their amazing open-source platform here.