AI Chatbots and Virtual Assistants for Customer Service

Enhance customer experiences and improve business processes with generative AI.

Workloads

Conversational AI / NLP
Generative AI

Industries

Telecommunications
Financial Services
Retail/Consumer Packaged Goods

Business Goal

Innovation
Return on Investment

Products

NVIDIA AI Enterprise
NVIDIA Riva
NVIDIA DGX
NVIDIA ACE
NVIDIA NIM
NVIDIA NeMo Retriever

Elevate Customer Experiences and Employee Productivity While Reducing Costs

As the global service economy grows, companies are increasingly turning to AI-powered solutions to enhance customer experiences and boost operational efficiency across various departments—like a contact center. With customer demand outpacing staffing capacity, businesses are relying on automated, real-time communication tools to assist human agents and support customers.

Generative AI-powered applications that are trained in domain-specific languages and enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can deliver more accurate, personalized, and context-aware interactions far beyond what traditional solutions can provide. Solutions such as AI virtual assistants, AI chatbots, or digital agents dynamically adapt to evolving customer needs and engage in human-like conversation. This level of sophistication and intelligence will ultimately help businesses scale customer service efficiently and maintain high customer satisfaction without compromising on quality.

To create more interactive and engaging customer service experiences, low-latency performance is crucial for lifelike conversations with digital human agents. With the necessary computational power to train and refine deep learning models, businesses can deliver seamless, responsive AI-driven interactions that continuously improve over time.

Telecommunications

Telecommunications companies need to deliver exceptional customer service while maintaining high network availability, performance, and security—all essential for running applications and services. This comes at a time when the industry is investing heavily in 5G and the expansion of fiber networks, significantly increasing capital expenditures. The challenge is providing accurate, reliable support through well-informed customer service agents.

In NVIDIA’s 2024 State of AI in Telecommunications report, 57% of telecom companies confirmed use of generative AI to improve customer service and support employee productivity. These enterprises are invested in call centers and improving end-to-end customer experiences, including order orchestration, order management, and case summarization. Improvement in customer experiences not only yields cost savings—it also increases revenue opportunities.

Financial Services

Generative AI is improving how consumers handle a range of financial transactions, including bill payments, money transfers, and opening new accounts. From call center transcription to intelligent chatbots, AI is helping remove barriers to customer support and reduce friction to execute common banking tasks. By providing self-service capabilities, banks can free-up customer service agents to concentrate on more complex, higher value interactions and transactions.

Generative AI also enhances customer service with personalized financial plans and investment recommendations and virtual assistants that can answer a wider array of customer inquiries than traditional chatbots.

According to NVIDIA’s 2024 State of AI in Financial Services survey report, 34% of respondents are exploring generative AI and large language models (LLMs) for customer experience and engagement. This suggests that financial services institutions are exploring chatbots, virtual assistants and recommendation systems to enhance the customer experience.

Retail

As the retail industry evolves, traditional approaches can often lead to customer frustration and lost sales opportunities. Generative AI and RAG offer transformative solutions through intelligent customer service chatbots that harness advanced algorithms to improve the shopping experience. 

Retailers are using generative AI and data science to offer real-time, hyperpersonalized experiences through recommender systems and chatbots that increase cart size, build brand affinity, and increase conversion. This includes capturing real-time user intent for next-item prediction in ecommerce, optimizing product selection, placement, and display design in physical stores, and generating captivating visual content for advertising campaigns. According to NVIDIA’s 2024 State of AI in Retail and CPG report, 69 percent of retailers believe AI has contributed to an increase in their annual revenue.

With generative AI at the forefront, the future of customer service chatbots in retail promises unparalleled convenience and satisfaction for consumers while unlocking new levels of efficiency and profitability for businesses.

Customize and Deploy Models at Scale

NVIDIA offers tools that help organizations embrace generative AI to build chatbots, AI virtual assistants, and virtual agents. To further empower strategic growth, these tools also include reference examples that enable them to use RAG to access vast internal and external datasets for more efficient information retrieval.

Optimal Inference for Generative AI Workloads

NVIDIA NIM, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, is a set of easy-to-use inference microservices designed to accelerate the deployment of generative AI across your enterprise. This versatile runtime supports open community models and NVIDIA AI Foundation models from the NVIDIA API catalog, as well as custom AI models. NIM builds on NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server, a powerful and scalable open-source platform for deploying AI models, and is optimized for LLM inference on NVIDIA GPUs with NVIDIA® TensorRT™-LLM. NIM is engineered to facilitate seamless AI inferencing with high throughput and low latency, while preserving the accuracy of predictions. You can deploy AI applications anywhere with confidence, whether on premises or in the cloud.

NVIDIA ACE Brings Digital Humans to Life With Generative AI

Built on NVIDIA AI, graphics, and simulation technologies, NVIDIA ACE encompasses technology for every part of the digital human—from speech and translation to vision and intelligence, to realistic animation and behavior, to lifelike appearance. And with RAG, you can convey specific and up-to-date information to customers. NVIDIA Tokkio is a reference workflow built with ACE, bringing AI-powered customer service capabilities to telecommunications, financial services, retail, and more.

Several ACE microservices are NVIDIA NIM microservices, optimized to run on NVIDIA GDN—a global network of GPUs that delivers low-latency digital human processing to 100 countries, on any cloud or PC.

NVIDIA ACE is now generally available from developer.nvidia.com/ACE. Developers can integrate ACE NIM microservices directly into their products, tools, services, or applications.

Real-Time Information Retrieval

NeMo Retriever is a collection of microservices that enable retrieval-augmented semantic search of enterprise data to deliver highly accurate responses. Developers can use these GPU-accelerated microservices for specific tasks, including extraction, embedding, and reranking of large volumes of data, interacting with existing relational databases, and searching for relevant pieces of information to answer business questions.

Integrating Speech AI Capabilities

NVIDIA Riva, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, is a set of GPU-accelerated multilingual speech and translation microservices for building fully customizable, real-time conversational AI pipelines. Riva includes automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and neural machine translation (NMT) and is deployable in all clouds, in data centers, at the edge, or on embedded devices. With Riva, organizations can add speech and translation interfaces with LLMs and RAG to transform chatbots into engaging and expressive multilingual assistants and avatars.

Getting Started With Generative AI for Customer Support

Enterprises looking to deploy generative AI models for virtual call center agents can use the NVIDIA API catalog to quickly get started building chatbots with RAG. NVIDIA offers an AI chatbot AI workflow and AI virtual assistant blueprint reference example to ease the path from pilot to production deployment.

  1. Start With State-of-the-Art Generative AI Models: Leading foundation models include Meta Llama 3, Google Gemma 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, retrieval models, and NVIDIA’s Nemotron-3 8B family, optimized for the highest performance per cost.
  2. Customize foundation models: Tune and test the models with proprietary data using NVIDIA NeMo™, an end-to-end platform for developing custom generative AI, anywhere.
  3. The Cloud-First Way to Get the Best of NVIDIA AI: NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud is an AI platform for enterprise developers, optimized for the demands of generative AI.
  4. Deploy and Scale: Run your applications anywhere—cloud, data center, or edge—by deploying with NVIDIA NIM, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the production-grade, secure, end-to-end software platform that includes generative AI reference applications and enterprise support.

AI Chatbot With RAG AI Workflow

The NVIDIA RAG chatbot AI workflow example streamlines the creation of enterprise solutions that generate precise responses for diverse applications. This example allows you to develop a RAG application using the latest GPU-optimized LLM, NeMo Retriever, and NIM microservices.

This workflow highlights how NVIDIA's integration with LangChain and LlamaIndex streamlines the development of scalable, high-performance RAG pipelines for LLM applications. It showcases a seamless setup using Docker, enhanced by NVIDIA NIM for better inference and flexibility, along with examples for easy deployment and API integration.

AI Virtual Assistant Blueprint

The NVIDIA AI Blueprint is a customizable toolkit designed to help developers build advanced AI virtual assistants. It includes essential tools like NIM microservices, reference code, and documentation to create AI systems that can handle tasks such as personalization, summarization, and sentiment analysis.

The AI Blueprint enhances customer service using RAG and generative AI technologies like NVIDIA NIM and NeMo. It addresses challenges such as fragmented data sources and data security, connecting these sources to improve operational efficiency in contact centers.

The blueprint provides advanced AI tools for secure data management, personalized multi-turn conversations, sentiment analysis, summary generation, and flexible session handling.

Generative AI can improve customer experiences in industries such as telecommunications, financial services, and retail by providing personalized and efficient service, reducing wait times, handling repetitive queries, and offering 24/7 availability. It can help power applications that are designed to assist with customer needs anytime, anywhere, and even analyze customer data for smarter and more personalized recommendations.

By automating tasks such as call routing, call categorization, and voice authentication, enterprises can greatly reduce wait times and guarantee customers are directed to the most qualified agents to handle their requests. Generative AI recommends next-best actions, identifies call sentiment, predicts customer satisfaction, and even measures agent quality and compliance.

Although speech AI can drive significant improvements to call centers, successfully implementing speech-to-text comes with a few challenges, including:

  • Phonetic ambiguity
  • Diverse speaking styles
  • Noisy environments
  • Limitations of telephony
  • Domain-specific vocabulary

Enhancing model effectiveness is one way to overcome these challenges. By integrating model training and retrieval techniques, chatbots can deliver a more reliable and responsive experience.

Enterprises can build custom generative AI models for applications in customer support with tools and frameworks from the NVIDIA AI platform. Here are the steps that help reduce development time:

  • Leverage prebuilt AI frameworks and tools.
  • Use pretrained models.
  • Implement a modular architecture.
  • Leverage open-source libraries and frameworks.
  • Use cloud-based services.
  • Collaborate with domain experts.

Refer to the “Getting Started With Generative AI for Customer Support” section to learn how NVIDIA NIM can help with deploying RAG-powered chatbots for virtual call center agents.

Enhance Customer Service and Support With Generative AI

Generative AI-powered applications are critical to the modernization and success of call center environments, offering an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Enterprises can build and deploy generative AI models with NVIDIA AI Enterprise to enhance customer support agents with real-time recommendations that help quickly resolve issues.