 Okay, Google. Let's greet everyone in the hall. Hello there. So good to talk to you. Okay. So, sorry. Google decides to greet us with the music. Okay. So, hello everyone. My name is Bond James Bond. Really? But just kidding. What's in the name? That's what William Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet. So he was not referring to names as such. So what were the names? Names were just the tags that were used as convention to describe something. People started referring to things with certain random terms and those random terms then became conventions that we carried today and we started referring to them as names of the things, people, objects and everything. But seriously, that question, what's in the name? That stuck me. And I thought let's explore if this question from the real world is still valid in the virtual world of the virtual bots and AI assistants. But what are they? Aren't they same? Don't bots, assistants, are generative AI? Aren't they same? Let's try to figure out if they are actually different or they are sides of same coin. So basically bots and assistants differ from each other with their design and purpose. Bots come with more of specific offerings and they try to handle requests that are restricted to a particular domain. Whereas your virtual assistants, they go everywhere. They spread across domains, they handle multiple things at a time, but then both of them, they increase the delivery of the assistant that they get to you. They help you as a second person who would have actually helped in a virtual space and overall ease your life to a greater extent, making the overall cognitive load go down. Let's try to go much more in detail on the differences between bots and assistants based on their applications. So the bots are usually used for 24-7 assistants, for consumer engagements, to increase lead generations. They are used to provide recommendations and then they are available within a system. They are part of your websites, you log onto a website and a bot jumps in from the bottom. You open a mobile app and the bot gets in. So they are restricted to a system, but what about the virtual assistants? So they can be omnipresent across the system. They can be there in your car, they can be there in your smart home devices and they can handle multiple things together. They can work with third-party apps, they can book an Uber for you, they can order your food from Swiggy. Bots don't do that. They're far more restrictive. Your assistants, as we all know, are the likes of Siri, Alexa, Google One, Bixby for Samsung, and then bots are restricted to your Aava or Erika or even a chat GPT is the next generation of the bots. So as I was talking about before, let's see what the specific usage is. When you are within a system, you open the system, you are greeted by the bot. The bot says, hey, why don't you tell me what's your problem and I'll solve it for you. And then you start with entering your problem either through chat or through a voice. But when you're on a virtual assistant, you need to awaken them. They're there in the system, they're there in the room, they're there in the ecosystem, but they're in a sleeping mode. You need to make them awake by saying, okay, Google, then the Google gets awakened and it listens to you. So for this purpose, you need a term to address the virtual assistant. But when you're on the bot side, the bot is the one who is going to start the conversation with you. So in the last year, we have the rise of chat GPT as it has become the largest growing software product across the globe. Google's and Baidu and Microsoft, they were not going to stay back. They also got their own versions of know it all bots. There are also other platforms which have decided to use the chat GPT's AI board and get their special purpose bots. So like chat spot is primarily used for events to have communication within the parties, sharing of information only for an event through chat. We have doc GPT that lets you upload a document and then you can chat to have more detail information about anything that's within the document just to understand that particular document. And then we have some completely unheard of application. Like just last week, we had something called QCPT that was launched by Excel Entertainment as the movie Fukure 3 was about to release. So that particular bot would give you answers as if you're interacting with Chucha and the character is responding to you. So these generative AI bots are going to be there and go forward. Now let's have a brief look at the assistants. We are Google's and Siri's and Bixby's and Alexa. What all they are doing? They're helping you. They're managing your calls. They're managing your communication. They're ordering food for you. They're ordering your groceries. They're entertaining you. They're entertaining your kids. They have managed a large part of our life and made it extremely convenient for us. There can be find them. There can be anywhere. In this whole room, we might have so many virtual assistants sitting on each other's phones, smart devices, etc. You can have them in partnered communications. You can have them inside your headphones. Your cars have them. Your TVs have them. They're everywhere. So let's have a look at various bots across the globe. Since I come from the banking industry, let's start with banking and see how their names change, how people have started naming their bots. So starting with North America, we see two main trades going inside North America. One is the identity, the brand identity, and second is the impact that the... Sorry, just a second. Okay, that the bot is trying to create. For example, if you see Bank of America's bot, it's called Erika. Now, Erika borrows Erika from the word America and forms its identity around the brand name. You have TD Bank, which has a bot named Clary. Now, Clary is a short form of Clarity that they want to show in the system, and the bot is said to give you Clarity about their system. Now, Alibank combines both the words. Ali has Ali from its name, and it's assisting the user, so assist. So the name comes as Ali assist. Capital one, on the other hand, uses part of its name and rearranges it as an anagram to get you Eno. Royal Bank of Canada has no me, which is essentially the term as no me, a common term to use, but it's trying to say no me. And then Wells Fargo settles for a part of its name, Fargo, as the name of its bot. When we come to India, we have the same trade in continuing, but there is one more thing that gets added, and that's acronyms. So HDFC Bank has electronic virtual assistant, which is your IWA. SBI has SBI's interactive assistant, or code named CIA. Then Kotak Bank uses the same analogy, but then takes the pronunciation out of it, and names it KIA. ICSA Bank takes the I from their brand name and gets the friendliness together to give us IPAL. And Access Bank takes the name Access, and an emotion of freedom and pleasure to combine it to Access AHA. Andhra Bank takes A and B from the name and says hi to us with a B. When we go global, we have the same term in continuing, and we have an addition of popular regional names getting in. Commonwealth Bank from Australia continues the acronym trend with SEBA, but then ILA Bank from Middle East gives us Fatima. Now Fatima is the most common name for Middle Eastern region. In Europe, what we see is the gender equality and the neutral gender they also get in, and then bots provided by the bank include multiple gender. So for ING Bank, they have three bots. One is Inga, one is Mari, and one is Bill. The SE Bank from Sweden has Aida and Abilia. Again, these are popular names from those regions, but then you also get an option to pick a gender you want to converse with. Now, same trend is there in Hong Kong with HSBC giving us Andrew and Amy, and then Hansing Bank in China gets Haro and Dori. Now, what's the difference between these bots, which are of different gender? Technically speaking, nothing. The backend engine is the same, but the front end gives you an additional window to treat whatever gender you prefer to have a conversation with that gender. If you move to some key banks, they decide not to go with any name. They just use their brand name, like Santander, Barclays, Lloyds. They just have their name going in as name of their bot. They don't have any persona around it. They don't have any character. It's just a name. Now, outside banking, there are some strange trends. So these trends continue, but then the logics change. For example, the Brussels Airport uses the three digit airport code BRU, and the pronunciation of the name Brussels combines together to get us Bruce. Now, Victoria's Secrets, since it's a brand for ladies, it combines the color of feminism, pink, with their brand name initials and gives us VS pink. And then a lot of hotels, they use the term butler, which is very common with their business, and convert a bot to a botler. So what should you consider when you're naming an assistant? What is the purpose of the assistant? Who are you going to cater it for? What the target audience is looking for? Do you need a personality when you're trying to give something? When you consider all these things, then you can decide what should be the overall persona that your assistant needs to provide to your end customers. What about gender? What gender should be the bot? Now, Amy, Debbie, Inga, Mia, Kora, these are not random names. Ten banks out of five by the largest size of assets in Europe in a study by Forbes show that they have bots which either have a female persona or a female voice. Now, that trend is very common to human because we start getting a female voice acquaintance when we are inside of a mother's womb as a fetus. It gives us soothing and calming feel and makes us understand the things easily. Female voice has also been considered as a good articulator for vowel sounds and that's why studies have shown that in workplace it's better to articulate female voice than a male voice. Pardon me that this study was conducted only at the workplace, so if you say that we are not able to articulate what our spouse are saying at home, that's not included in the study. Female voice gets easier to understand when it is at a higher pitch and particularly that's why it was also used in Second World War to give instructions to pilot who are flying the fighter jets. There are innumerable of studies that show that female voice is usually preferred across the Americas. But then the social commentators come in and then they say shouldn't we go for a gender neutral voice, shouldn't we go for something that gives user a choice to select from. So again there are studies which show it's sympathetic nature of the female voice is what is preferred by the users. Now apart from just the voice quality it's also required to know that the overall experience, how the product strategies, what is the brand perception for the user, these things are also extremely important and they need to get reflected in the bot. But in the first place, do we really want to converse with a bot or do our users just want their problems solved? So now Alexa, Siri, Google, they are all in a particular ecosystem and people are extremely okay to have a conversation with these virtual assistants. But bots are on a particular website, they are on a page. You don't need to announce your arrival on these pages to say that hey Bank of America, I'm here, now talk to me. They already know that you are there and they ask you what your problem is. So having a chat interface or having a voice interface is actually a good thing from a user's perspective but it should not get annoying. I remember here the Microsoft Clippy which was there in 97 to somewhere around early 2000s as part of Microsoft Office. It was a cute little U-Clip that used to appear on our screens and help us with show us some gestures and all. But people don't want things to be cute, they want them to be helpful and easy to use. The moment it starts to get annoying, it needs to go off. So when we are getting into our bot configuration, we need to make sure that it helps our users and lets them do what they actually want to do. Now, people like to name their positions. Several people name their cars, people name their mobile phones, their knickknacks. And this is because as humans, we like to assert the control over the tools by naming them. When you say, hey Google, do it for me. Whosoever you might be in your life, you are putting that control on Google and getting a job done from the Google and that gives you pleasure. And when the job is done, it gives you an additional pleasure. So what can we expect in the future? We have started seeing this trend going with the generative bots that the personalization has started getting in. They would learn about you and then they would cater to you as per your specific requirement. The other thing that will get is the SME bots. You might expect a banking detail and then your Alexa would take your bank's virtual assistant for additional help and the SME assistant would help you. Your Siri might involve the IKEA assistant who would help you in fixing your wall unit. So we can see these things in the future but then to reach that level, what we need to do is go step by step, start with bots, convert them to the IVR vocal bots and then expect them to learn things so that they can be converted into virtual assistants for the user. Now, when you're planning this strategy, do think from all perspectives while you're naming your bot or virtual assistants. Thank you.