Welcome to the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short! Imagine a world where machines can learn, reason and make decisions just like humans. That’s what AI is all about. At its core, AI is all about teaching computers to do things that normally require human intelligence. Think of tasks like understanding language, recognizing faces, making predictions and even playing games. AI allows computers to handle these tasks with remarkable accuracy and efficiency.

AI is already all around us, from voice assistants like Siri and Alexa to recommendation systems on streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify. As AI continues to advance, it promises to revolutionize industries, improve our daily lives and maybe even change the way we think about what it means to be intelligent.

There are different types of AI, one of which is called Generative AI – this is a type of artificial intelligence that is capable of creating new content or data based on patterns it has learned from existing information. It works by understanding and analyzing large sets of data, such as text, images or music and then generating new content that is similar in style or theme to the original data. Hence the term generative. 

Here’s a simple (and fun!) example of Generative AI – imagine you have a magical writing robot. This robot has read thousands of stories and learned how they’re structured. You give it a starting sentence, like “Once upon a time, there was a friendly dragon.” Then, just like magic, the robot continues the story by itself, creating sentences that sound like they’re part of a real fairy tale.

Another type of AI is known as Conversational AI. Its purpose and techniques are different from that of Generative AI. Conversational AI focuses on understanding and responding to human language in a conversation and is commonly seen in chatbots and virtual assistants. It analyzes human language input, interprets its meaning and generates appropriate responses or takes actions accordingly. Here’s an example. In a simple customer support requirement if a customer seeks help in an online chat powered by Conversational AI, at midnight or 3:00 in the morning, not only would they feel as if they are chatting with a real person but their query or request will also be tackled promptly and efficiently.

In a real industry scenario, CleanDesk AI is a multilingual conversational AI automation platform leveraging generative AI, which automates 70-80% of customer inquiries, requests, complaints and employee tasks, benefiting both customers and teams. The various CleanDesk AI products are designed to automate the most important business processes – lead generation, sales management, customer support, customer engagement and interaction with a personalized approach, marketing, advanced data analytics and more. The scope and benefits of using the CleanDesk platform are immense, irrespective of the industry.

Conversational AI is often designed to sound as human-like as possible, especially in terms of natural language understanding and response generation. The goal is to make interactions with conversational AI systems feel more like talking to a real person, which can enhance user engagement and satisfaction. Having said that, both Conversational AI and Generative AI have their own unique capabilities and applications, and neither is inherently better than the other. Instead, they complement each other and can be used together or separately depending on the task at hand.