4 minutes read

What is a voicebot? How it works, History, Benefits

Learn how voicebots work, to why they're popular in customer service with 98% accuracy and 24/7 availability.

Published on

January 29, 2025

Maurizio Isendoorn

Co-Founder

The Covid-19 pandemic completely changed how we live and work - millions of people worldwide had to adapt overnight. Contact centers? They got hit hard. Companies watched their customer service teams drown in an explosion of requests. Picture this: fewer resources, less time, but way more customers needing help. That's what 2020 looked like for customer service teams everywhere.

But here's where things get interesting - voicebots, a technology that showed up right when we needed it most.

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Check this out: back in 2020, NICE InContact did a study that revealed something mind-blowing - 39% of all contact center interactions were handled completely by machines. No humans needed. That's what voicebots do. And companies are implementing this tech quickly.

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Here's why: when you let voicebots handle all those boring, repetitive tasks, your contact center productivity goes through the roof. Your agents save tons of time, and guess what? It makes your customers happier too. Think about it - voicebots give people exactly what they want: quick answers, zero waiting time, and they can handle everything themselves.

But wait - what exactly is a voicebot?

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The definition of a voicebot

Ever talked to Siri? Then you've used a voicebot:

it's basically a robot that can have a real conversation with you over the phone.

Think of a voicebot as your personal virtual helper. It's smart enough to understand what you're saying, figure out what you need, and analyze your requests. Then it talks back to you in normal, everyday language - just like chatting with a friend. Pretty cool, right?

The secret sauce? Conversational artificial intelligence. That's just fancy talk for teaching robots to understand human speech and what we really mean when we say things.

You probably know the big players - Siri, Alexa, and that helpful voice that pops up when you say "Ok Google". These voicebots are everywhere now - in our phones, helping us make phone calls (callbots), popping up on websites, and even hanging out in our cars and kitchen appliances!

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The history of voicebots

Let's take a quick trip down memory lane. In 1961, IBM created this thing called Shoebox - the first computer that could understand voice. But don't get too excited - it only knew 16 words and could count to 9. Baby steps, right?

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The real magic started in the 1970s when some smart folks at Carnegie Mellon University cracked the code on speech recognition.

Fast forward to 1993, and IBM drops the Simon - the world's first smartphone that could turn your words into text. Pretty groundbreaking stuff!

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The 2000s is when things got wild. Google, Apple, and Microsoft jumped in and changed the game. Google Voice Search showed up in 2008, letting you search the web just by talking. Then in 2011, Siri landed on the iPhone 4S and blew everyone's minds.

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Since then? Voice assistants have been everywhere, making life easier left and right.

Here's the thing - people (especially the younger crowd) love talking to these voicebots. Why? Because talking is just more natural for us humans. It's quick, it's easy, and it just feels right.

Plus, voicebots are super convenient. You can chat with them while driving, cooking dinner, or chasing your kids around - no hands needed!

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And where are voicebots now, in 2025?

In 2025, voicebots are better than ever. Since AI has improved a ton, AI voicebots like those of Ringly.io are almost indistinguishable with humans.

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Let's listen to a conversation with Ringly's AI voicebot:

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How does a voicebot work?

Here's the cool part - these voicebots are crazy good at understanding what you're saying (we're talking 98% accurate here) just by listening to your voice.

When you start talking, something called VAD (=Voice Activity Detection) picks up your voice. Then, ASR (=automatic speech recognition) turns your words into text. Together, these make up the STT (=speech to text) engine - basically, they write down what you say.

Next up, the brain of the operation - the NLU (=natural language understanding) - figures out what you actually want. Just like a human would!

Finally, the voicebot picks the perfect response and uses TTS (=text-to-speech) to talk back to you. And get this - all of this happens in less than a second! Mind-blowing, right?

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Benefits of voicebots

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	Ringly.io AI Voicebot	Human Agents
Availability	✓ 24/7/365 availability	✗ Limited by work hours
Response Time	✓ Instant responses	✗ Variable wait times
Handling Volume	✓ Unlimited concurrent conversations	✗ Limited by staff size
Cost Efficiency	✓ Fraction of human agent cost	✗ High operational costs
Consistency	✓ 100% consistent responses	✗ Varies by agent
Scalability	✓ Instantly scalable	✗ Requires hiring & training