Four steps to creating your own intelligent virtual assistant

When it comes to developing your own Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), you can easily design, test, train and deploy your bot – all without writing a single line of code. This step-by-step guide guides you through the IVA software development lifecycle to ensure proper implementation.

There are four main stages in the life cycle of an intelligent virtual assistant:

• design and build
• the train
• test
• Post and rate

Step one – build and deploy

The first step in designing and creating your virtual assistant is to go through and think about the experience you want your VA to provide. Start by thinking about your customers’ needs and determine what use cases will be most beneficial.

At the end of the day, it’s the experience that will bring your customers—your customers—back to your business and foster brand loyalty.

Questions asked before construction:

• When do we want to have buttons, widgets or different graphics?

• What is the experience based on which channels we distribute to?

• Will it be a web, mobile or call experience?

• What will that experience look like depending on the channel?

This is where you will go through the entire conversation design process to begin framing your IVA. You basically build a foundation that will end with training, testing and deployment as you progress.

Step two – training

During training, you collect data about how users talk about certain topics so that IVA can accurately recognize different expressions (parts of spoken language) during a conversation. For example, if a customer wants to ask a question about their account balance, there are a number of different ways a person can ask:

One of the main goals of this phase is to collect as much data as possible to train your Natural Language Understanding (NLU) so that your bot can have intelligence around these topics. Training also helps the intelligent virtual assistant understand what your customers are asking for, so it can take the action needed to fulfill the customer’s intent.

Step three – testing

The testing phase is a good way to evaluate the performance of an intelligent virtual assistant after training, helping to determine whether it understands what the user is saying.

Testing also involves identifying areas where the virtual assistant lacks understanding, allowing us to enhance its intelligence and overcome these gaps with additional training data.

There are several different testing models that you can use depending on your needs. You can test individual utterances, batch test multiple requests, or perform an entire conversation test. A conversational test shows what the full user experience looks like. It’s normal to go back and forth between training and testing as you get more data and discover new questions. Once you are satisfied with the testing of the intelligent virtual assistant, you can move on to the deployment.

Step Four – Deployment and performance improvements

During the deployment phase, the virtual assistant is designed, built, trained and tested, ensuring its effectiveness in the tasks for which it was created. With deployment you will also experience some performance improvements. As more people interact with your virtual assistant, you’ll be able to analyze what they understand and what they don’t to find ways to improve it. Over time, this analysis process will make the virtual assistant more intelligent by training it on additional data collected from production users.

Ready to build your own bots and want a detailed step-by-step guide? Check out our review of creating a virtual assistant for a complete, in-depth process.

Want to learn more?

We are here to support your learning journey. Ready to start building a bot but don’t know where to start? Learn conversational AI skills and get certified on the Kore.ai Experience Optimization (XO) platform.

As a leader in conversational AI platforms and solutions, Kore.ai helps enterprises automate front- and back-office business interactions to deliver exceptional experiences for their customers, agents and employees.