What are Interactive Virtual Assistants? The Top 5 IVAs of 2024

Modern technology understands and responds to human speech.

Interactive, or intelligent, virtual assistants (IVAs) bring this tech closer to employees and customers. With their ability to handle engagement at scale, IVAs free up human hours previously spent addressing straightforward questions.

An intelligent virtual assistant software platform automates redundancies in daily operations, making teams more efficient and productive. 

IVAs engage both employees and customers conversationally. They understand parts of speech and respond to queries accordingly, thanks to their natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Unlike the older, more conventional chatbots, IVAs use the capabilities of generative AI to converse with context. This helps organizations handle customer interactions at scale, especially on the customer success and support side of the business. 

Customer support reps often turn to interactive virtual assistants for call routing, ticket management, and customer feedback. When virtual assistants are client-facing, they talk to customers to answer simple questions and gather information before sending issues to support agents. 

Types of interactive virtual assistants

Organizations use these virtual assistants in their day-to-day operations. Modern virtual assistants are cross-trained for different use cases.

• Task-oriented assistants cater to users’ specific needs, such as organizing emails or scheduling meetings. 

• Voice-activated assistants like Alexa or Siri activate on vocal commands. People use them for simple tasks such as finding information or playing music.
• Predictive assistants apply machine learning (ML) to predict users' needs before they ask. Google Now or Cortana are two examples.

• Domain-specific virtual assistants are built, as the name indicates, for specific industries and are often trained for accuracy. Several research studies are being conducted to implement domain-specific virtual assistants in healthcare and finance research and development sectors. For example, healthcare workers may soon use a domain-specific IVA to search documents for the impact of a chemical on cells. 

• Voice assistants use speech recognition and NLP to respond to queries vocally. You might interact with them daily when you chat with Siri, Google Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa.

• AI avatars find use cases in entertainment. They give a human touch to virtual support interactions.

Why are interactive virtual assistants important for businesses?

Interactive virtual assistants mimic the way customers and visitors converse with human agents on your team. But there’s seldom any trick there. Businesses are transparent about the use of machine bots, and they provide options to speak to a human agent for more crucial or urgent queries on the customer support front. 

How does this help? 

Due to the presence of IVAs, only a small share of queries go to human agents for resolution. This helps teams manage interactions at scale without the need for new hiring. 

On the customer support side, IVAs route calls and chats intelligently based on customer information. This speeds up the resolution process because customers get paired with support agents who are well-equipped to resolve their problems. 

IVAs are operational 24/7, 365 days to address customer queries as they come. Humans operate in shifts or take breaks. IVAs fill the void when customers need help during human downtime. Moreover, some IVAs integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software to contextualize the interaction based on previous chats and conversations.

Technologies that power virtual assistants

Various technologies work together to help virtual assistants become a valuable asset for people and professionals. Here are some of the most notable. 

• NLP lets virtual assistants process unique customer data to make responses more accurate. Although these assistants are pre-trained, understanding customer queries helps keep the context.

• Deep learning helps IVAs process data just like a human brain. They produce more accurate answers and provide better responses based on existing interactions between support staff and customers.

• Generative adversarial networks (GANs), a machine-learning model, have two neural networks competing with each other to produce the most accurate responses and predictions. GANs are used to create 3D faces of AI avatars. You’ll find it in Nvidia Omniverse Avatar for Project Maxine. 

• Augmented reality (AR) allows virtual and real-world objects to interact, giving users an immersive experience. 
• Emotion AI tracks users’ non-verbal behavior in real time. It’s based on computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Virtual assistants powered with emotional AI can analyze speech tonality to create responses that complement user emotions. 
• Speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies convert human voice to text and vice versa. It makes communication smooth and efficient between the application and the user.

• Computer vision helps AI virtual assistants understand visual signals and classify objects accurately. It uses a camera to store data and perform real-time face detection when users look at the screen. They improve the accuracy of speech recognition software by comparing the movement of the face and mouth.

Interactive virtual assistants vs. chatbots

Interactive virtual assistants and chatbots seem to be close cousins, but they’re unique in their ways. 

Interactive virtual assistants perform various tasks like helping humans and scheduling meetings. They use artificial intelligence with NLP and ML to understand questions like humans would and respond accordingly. 

Chatbots are pre-programmed to understand specific queries and phrases. They don't comprehend queries in a human way unless the issues match their training data. 

AI chatbots can now understand and respond as humans. Still, they’re not the same as interactive virtual assistants because of their comparatively narrow functionality, such as information gathering, customer support, or tracking orders. However, AI chatbot software keeps learning through interactions, and as their use cases expand, the line between IVAs and AI chatbots may grow finer. 

The 5 best intelligent virtual assistant software platforms of 2024

Using artificial intelligence, IVA software transforms and responds to voice or text inputs. Natural language processing assists the tool in understanding the inputs as deep learning and machine learning capabilities power its continuous improvements. As the number of interactions grows, IVAs become better at understanding colloquial language and widen their vocabulary.

Businesses use virtual agents for many reasons, such as making interactions quicker and more efficient in customer service. 

To be included on this list, a product must include:: 

• NLP or speech recognition to understand a conversational request 
• The ability to modify conversational flows
• Conversation analyses via dashboards or reports
• Human handover capabilities
• Accuracy and viability of IVAs with human-in-the-loop functionality

* Below is a list of leading interactive virtual assistant software based on the G2 Winter 2024 Grid® Report. Some reviews might have been edited for clarity. 

1. Kore.AI

Kore.ai offers a platform to design and host intelligent virtual assistants and conversational applications. These solutions help businesses improve cloud call centers and search capabilities. 

The platform provides no-code tools and lets businesses select large language models (LLMs) and infrastructure as they need. 

What users like best:

“Kore.AI is the best platform that helps people develop chatbots and virtual assistants. It is a no-code and low-code platform where we can create chatbots easily. The best part is they make us learn by training us and helping us understand the concepts of how to build and test the bot, which helps me to get the best human-friendly bot.”

- Kore.ai Review, Shiva Kumar B.

What users dislike:

“Sometimes you can get lost in the documentation because there is a lot of it.” 

- Kore.ai Review, Marlene S.

2. IBM Watsonx Assistant

IBM Watsonx Assistant is a conversational AI platform with a natural language interface that delivers fast, consistent, and accurate responses. It integrates communication across several platforms, making it a versatile and user-friendly bot. 

What users like best:

“Watson Assistant is a drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy to create conversational interfaces without any coding experience. It is accurate. Watson Assistant uses natural language processing to understand the intent of your users' questions and provide correct answers.”

- IBM Watsonx Assistant Review, Hussam Eldeen M. 

What users dislike:

“Price Is still on the steeper side, which may mean convincing a lot of senior management people and getting approvals.”

- IBM Watsonx Assistant Review, Rajat P.

3. Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now integrated into Microsoft Copilot Studio, allows professionals to create AI-powered chatbots without the need for coding skills or AI expertise. These bots can handle tasks from answering routine questions to resolving common issues. 

The platform comes with a no-code development feature for creating customer bots. You can deploy these IVAs across multiple channels, including websites and Facebook. 

What users like best:

“If you’re looking for a tool to create a custom AI chatbot, I highly recommend checking out Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. What I love about this tool is that you can create chatbots without any coding experience. The setup process is incredibly user-friendly. You create your chatbot topic, set up questions and answers, and publish. The best thing is that you can test your bot in real time on the same window. In my experience, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is a great choice to enhance customer support and engagement.”

- Microsoft Power Virtual Agent Review, Furqan R.

What users dislike:

“Very limited features, limited integration. No option for bulk entities update.”

- Microsoft Power Virtual Agent Review, Mayur S.

4. Moveworks

Moveworks helps teams address support tickets, search content, and discover data through AI-driven assistance. The platform supports over 100 languages and offers a fluid user experience (UX), delivering a user-friendly interface. 

The IVA dynamically creates follow-up questions, generates summaries, and provides citations while automating several business tasks. 

What users like best:

“I like the level of support they give us and how they partner with us to improve the product. My favorite features are the ticket triage and communications features of Nexthink.”

- Moveworks Review, Mark W.

What users dislike:

“Moveworks is growing fast, and you can sometimes see their strain on resources. I have seen this with delayed follow-ups on issues we may be experiencing.”

- Moveworks Review, David K.

5. Expressive

Espressive’s interactive virtual assistant, Barista, redefines workplace assistance with its AI-based capabilities. It offers a no-code experience, allowing enterprises to customize their virtual agent to suit their needs. Barista can integrate with any API-enabled third-party system and handle complex issues through dynamic and interactive conversations.

What users like best:

“Barista's ability to seamlessly reduce the number of Helpdesk tickets created by our user base. This product provides us with the ability to customize the answers it offers, and our internal IT team easily manages the product. During the first week of going live with Barista, over 60% of user questions were correctly answered. The questions that weren't properly answered were updated with the help of the Espressive team's weekly reports showing us improvement opportunities. This helps us continuously improve Barista's knowledge!

- Espressive Review, Osvaldo L.

What users dislike:

“Depending on the organization and the security restrictions, Barista can be very complex to setup. For our organization, the most valuable win with Barista, would be to automate processes fully. This means that after answering a few questions, Barista would take care of the rest. Unfortunately, we are not quite there yet.”

- Espressive Review, Verified Used in Financial Services

Make a wise choice

Choosing the perfect interactive virtual agent for your business depends on which features and functionalities you expect from the software. Use your best judgment to narrow down the software you want to test, and remember that you can always return to our customer reviews for real feedback. 

Check out the top free intelligent voice assistant software tools you can try out to find a suitable solution.