The pressure that online businesses face today is nothing short of insurmountable. From impeccable customer service to highly personalized experiences — consumers place heavy demands on brands and are always ready to take their business elsewhere if their expectations have not been met.
To cope with the challenges and stay ahead of the game, businesses are increasingly turning to the most impactful tech of today — artificial intelligence. The talk of the town, AI is receiving steady fame as the power that drives digital transformation across industries. When it comes to creating more powerful web apps that will help you stand out from the crowd, AI also has a lot to offer — smarter UI and personalized UX, improved interactions with visitors, and more.
AI comes in different flavors, and all of them can find its use in web app development.
Different types of AI in software development
AI is an umbrella term for advanced techniques, methods and algorithms that mimic human intelligence to bring capabilities to machines.
- Machine learning (ML). ML underpins computers’ ability to act without being explicitly programmed. ML algorithms process vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and make decisions, automatically improving throughout the process.
- Computer vision (CV). CV allows machines to interpret and gain a high-level understanding of the visual world by mimicking basic functions of human vision like motion detection and scene comprehending.
- Natural language processing (NLP). NLP helps computers understand human speech, whether written or spoken. The technology enables machines to analyze raw language input, draw summary and even gauge sentiment.
Now, let’s see how these different types of AI can help organizations build better and smarter web applications that exceed expectations of the modern-day user.
5 benefits of AI for your software applications
Personalized app experience
AI’s strong suite is collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data on consumer behavior, including browsing history, user preferences and interests, social media footprint, and more. By leveraging AI in web development, you can better segment your audiences and significantly enhance targeting precision. The result is hyper-personalized content tailored exactly to the customer who is engaging with it.
From Netflix to Amazon, ML-based recommendation algorithms work under the hood of all your favorite sites. With 57+ million subscribers, Netflix knows that the one-size-fits-all approach just won’t do, so each time a user visits the service, the home page is dynamically populated with the most relevant and carefully selected recommendations, which drives engagement through the roof.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
Another way to improve your web app usability and increase conversion rates is through conversational AI. Thanks to NLP, chatbots and virtual assistants have become smarter, more responsive and extremely helpful. In fact, a Salesforce survey revealed that 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions.
What are the benefits of communicating with businesses via chatbots vs. apps?
Source: Salesforce
Intelligent chatbots, however, can do much more than just answering FAQs. Seamless customer support, personalized recommendations, real-time order tracking and status update, and even payment processing — implementing an AI chatbot allows you to develop a richer web application.
Voice-based interactions
Voice recognition technology is gaining traction. But don’t take our word for it. IDC predicts that by 2022, as many as 30% of worldwide enterprises will use conversational speech tech for customer engagement.
Adding voice control to your web application opens up a whole new dimension. As voice is our best communication tool, voice-based interfaces significantly improve usability and increase accessibility for all groups of visitors.
With just a few lines of code, you can integrate speech recognition capabilities into your web application, enabling users to search, navigate, and even fill the forms just using their voice. Or you can give voice to your intelligent chatbot and boost customer satisfaction. After all, talking to our mobiles and smarts devices has long become the new norm (hey, Alexa), so you might as well capitalize on that affection.
Visual content discovery
With the ability to process visual images and video, computer vision can bring new powerful capabilities to your web application like extracting image features, automatically tagging content, recognizing similarities, and more.
The use cases for these efficiencies are versatile. You may choose to apply CV to easily surface and recommend the relevant products based on their visual affinity, significantly boosting content discoverability. Or you may leverage image auto-captioning and generate descriptions for low-vision users. CV algorithms can also help you with quality control and moderation by automatically filtering out any unwanted visual content.
How we can help
Real-time video analysis, object detection and tracking, facial and emotion recognition, intelligent scene-related ad placement, automated content CQ and compliance — we build innovative CV-assisted solutions that increase performance and promote brand safety.
AI-driven analytics
Last but not least come analytical capabilities of AI. Machine learning-powered monitoring tools can track your web application behavior in real time, identify bottlenecks and pinpoint the source of the problems, and even proactively predict anomalies before they occur.
Depending on your web application specifics, ML-driven analytics systems can monitor various QoS-related performance metrics — application availability, average response time, error rate, connection speed, and more. Only with this 360-degree visibility into your app behavior, you can guarantee reliable performance and exceptional QoE for your end users.
The bottom line
AI in web development continues to draw increased interest from forward-thinking companies as a way to enhance their offering and stay ahead of the curve. With such cutting-edge capabilities as data-driven analysis, computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing, AI enables developers to build smart and highly engaging applications. Hyper-personalized experiences, intelligent chatbots, voice-based interactions, visual product discovery — the potential of AI to add value to your web application is truly immense.
