Are you tired of sifting through countless results on Google or Bing that are perhaps just as helpful as a broken compass? There are an estimated 10 billion searches each day, and nearly half of them go unanswered. That’s because people no longer use search engines only for blue links or web page discoveries. Instead, online search is not just for landing on a website but for hunting for answers to complex questions and discovering immersive, personalized recommendations.

The drudgery of online search is just nearing its end. Both Google and Bing have reinforced their search capabilities with generative and conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, Microsoft announced a new AI-powered Bing- a search interface with a language model chatbot that’s able to run searches for you and summarize results, plus do all the fun stuff that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been doing lately.

Sometimes, you need more than an answer - you need inspiration. The Open AI-powered Bing can generate content to help you. It can help you make a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prepare for a job interview or make a quiz for trivia night.

Google, too, has launched Bard- an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Now available only to trusted testers, Bard is likely to be integrated with Google search and a few other applications like Google Maps. Bard is positioned as an outlet for creativity and a platform for curiosity.

Why AI-powered search

Using AI-powered search on your site could help you increase customer satisfaction, increase conversion rates, and shore up revenue by giving users exactly what they want. Netflix and Pinterest have made consumers expect instantaneous, personalized content. Users’ expectations and the search experiences they get can be bridged with AI-powered search. Refinement is based on several factors programmed into the AI system, like past purchases, common spelling errors, and the intent behind the language. AI-powered search powers sites like Pinterest, where AI learns from millions of image-based searches, people do every month. With more than 320 million users and billions of “pins,” the company has tons of data, which is fed into a deep learning model to surface personalized results.

How does AI search work?

For search, AI usually consists of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to determine user intent and return relevant results. Machine learning and NLP combined with AI mean a search can work independently and return even more relevant results. Smart speakers and assistants will start 70 per cent of customer interactions by 2023, according to Gartner.

Transforming User Experience (UX)

By understanding the nuances of language and intent instead of just matching keywords, AI-powered search can improve accuracy and relevance. With AI-powered search, you can make search more efficient, personalized, and accurate. Here are the three ways in which it transforms UX:

Hyper-Personalized Customer Experience: 

AI-based platforms can identify patterns and user types as well as recommend customized workflows for each user. Data analytics without AI can identify broad patterns, but AI systems can dig deeper and provide insights into several more scenarios and use cases. The UX becomes hyper-personalized at this point. Have you ever wondered how Netflix recommends movies and series so accurately? The program banner of each title is personalized based on user preferences, not just recommendations. Based on data about user engagement, Netflix’s AI engine created this beautiful bit of forethought.

Offering Few but Most Suitable Options to the Users

Simplicity is one of the most important principles of UX. An interface that requires the user to expend effort to decode indicates a bad customer experience (CX). Most products and services require the user to select alternatives, but too many options make it difficult for the user. You can have 100 cool features in your product, but if your customer has to navigate through all of them, he or she will be slowed down. AI and Machine Learning (ML) can help here. These technologies help users narrow down their options based on their demographics and past experiences and present the most likely options to them. This facilitates faster, better, and hassle-free decision-making for end users.

Making User Experience More Interactive

AI isn’t just working behind the scenes; it’s also making the UX more interactive. Conversational AI, like chatbots and virtual assistants, is everywhere now. New services and products have been launched that use computer vision, Augmented Reality (AR), NLP, text recognition, speech-to-text conversion, drones, and robots. AI and ML power all of these solutions. An empathetic context can be built into the UX design with the help of such innovative AI solutions.

The next frontier in search- AI, the game changer 

AI-powered search is incredibly exciting and full of potential in the future. By using AI-powered search, we can skip sifting through countless irrelevant search results and find exactly what we want and when we want it. Perhaps, AI-powered search will help us finally answer that age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?”

https://uxofai.com/ https://www.ericsson.com/en/ai/ux-design-in-ai https://www.liveperson.com/conversational-ai/#:~:text=Conversational%20AI%20combines%20natural%20language,future%20of%20self%2Dlearning%20AI.