The pandemic is emptying call centers. AI chatbots are swooping in

IBM's and Google's platforms work in similar ways. They make it easy for clients to spin up chat or voice-based agents that act a lot like Alexa or Siri but are tailored to different applications. When users text or call in, they are free to speak in open-ended sentences. The system then uses natural-language processing to parse their "intent" and responds with the appropriate scripted answer or reroutes them to a human agent. For queries that can't be answered automatically, the algorithms group similar ones together to show the most commonly missed intents.