Language User Interfaces for Employees, Partners, Users
A language user interface is a type of interface that allows users to interact with business applications using natural language. This means that instead of using menus, buttons, or other traditional forms of input, users can simply speak or type in their requests using everyday language. As natural language processing technology continues to improve, language user interfaces are becoming more common in a variety of business apps, including customer service chatbots, expense tracking apps, sales enablement tools, and project management apps. By providing a more intuitive and user-friendly way to interact with these apps, language user interfaces can improve user satisfaction and productivity, reduce training and support costs, and increase data accuracy.
Implementing language user interfaces can provide significant benefits to both users and organizations. By allowing employees, partners, and users to interact with business apps using natural language, these interfaces can improve user satisfaction and productivity, reduce training and support costs, and increase data accuracy. As large language models improve in power and become cheaper to produce in-house (e.g. Alpaca, GPT4All), we can expect to see more and more business apps adopting this type of interface.
Examples of business apps that could benefit from a natural language interface include:
- Customer service chatbots that can answer common questions and route issues to the correct department
- Expense tracking apps that allow users to add expenses and receipts using using voice/chat commands
- Sales enablement tools that allow salespeople to quickly access information about products and services using using voice/chat commands
- Project management apps that allow users to add tasks, set reminders, and check their progress using voice/chat commands
- Data analysis bots that can answer direct questions for end users without having to study a chart or graph in a BI tool.
The Opportunities
There are many opportunities that are out there in being able to help companies, professionals, and consumers. Each area of opportunity have their pros and cons, but the core technology and knowledge to build them can be simply broken down into two categories: Systems that shrink data and knowledge (Experts) , personal or workspace assistants (Assistants) that execute tasks intelligently, and combinations of traditional software with Experts and Assistants (Platforms) that enable collaboration between humans with the help of background Experts/Assistants aiding in process execution.
Though the industry and AI watchers claim the singularity is here, we think there is much work to be done to define exactly what it can do for people. Chatbots (Experts) like ChatGPT, Bing, and Poe are available to everyone, tools such as Tome, Jasper, Rytr, Github Copilot (Assistants) can help people write content or code, and platforms such as Notion, Todoist, are integrating LLM into their productivity apps. What does this mean for companies that want to transform their business platforms?
We think there are three categorizations or areas that at the high level that can help us understand the patterns of the technology and their use cases.
Companies, Organizations, Governments
Using AI to facilitate Process to Create Value for the Customer, Employee, Partners,
- Experts: Shrinking the domains of knowledge and data for everyone in and around an organization so that expertise can be scaled. This is an opportunity for enterprise multi-tenant SaaS software, single-tenant managed OnPremise/Cloud offering and professional services to customize for each client.
- Assistants: Creating workplace assistants with specialized knowledge which execute processes behind the scenes between people , processes, information, and systems. This is an opportunity initially for professional services / consulting help companies streamline the business, it’s people, processes, information and systems. Eventually it can be verticalized into specialized workplace assistants that are available on an marketplace.
- Platforms: Companies that want to transform their digital business technology platform can integrate AI Experts, Assistants together with Apps to give users the ability to interact together with Experts and Assistants interacting on tasks in the background.
Professionals & Professional Services Organizations
Using AI to facilitate processes between knowledge workers who create value in collaboration with other humans and AI Experts/Assistants
- Experts: Shrinking the domains of knowledge and data for specialized professions such as legal, technical, accounting, medical, etc. so that vast amounts of knowledge that previously required prior knowledge or tedious searching is made available to users for free or small fees.
- Assistants: Creating professional assistants that have access to professionals or groups of professionals to help them relate to their staff, customers and carry out tedious tasks that normally are done by a combination of several software tools and a human that knows the professional or the group well. Professional services organizations often have individuals who build a book of business by themselves and use the larger organization’s infrastructure for day to day processes like payroll, etc. Now the organization can offer accountants, lawyers, consultants better infrastructure that makes their core offering easier to deliver and more appealing to work with.
- Platforms: Most professional services organizations provide a business platform for their consultants to work with other staff to deliver value to clients. A business platform that ties together the team can help deliver value to customers seamlessly.
If you are interested in learning what Language User Interfaces can do for you, your startup, or your existing business, we’d love to hear about your use case and see if there’s an opportunity to work together and make something big.