Application Development

February 15 , 2024 by Nick Ma

Introduction 

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses face the challenge of efficiently managing high volumes of customer interactions. Without advanced tools like chatbots, companies often struggle with the following challenges: 

• Prolonged response times: Recent research suggests an average wait time of around 12 minutes to connect with a UK help desk representative, depending on the time of day. The shortest average wait time was for human response at 2 minutes 3 seconds, while the longest was 85 minutes. 
• Inconsistent support quality: Inconsistent support quality leads to customer dissatisfaction, eroding brand reputation and resulting in lost business opportunities. Customers frustrated by uneven service levels are less likely to return or recommend the brand, impacting long-term business growth and success.
• Increased operational costs: The average cost per human customer support call is $2.70 – $5.60. For a customer-serving team that handles tens of thousands to millions of customer interactions, the cost can easily surpass $100K and may be as high as millions. 

These pain points associated with traditional, labor-intensive customer support are not just challenges; they’re a pressing crisis. They lead to a painful exodus of customers, ignite a wildfire of negative reviews, and balloon operational costs. This isn’t just a dent in your finances; it’s a devastating blow to your top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability. 

We are happy to announce Vectara Chat, a new feature that enables developers to build state-of-the-art chatbots using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). Vectara Chat addresses these challenges head-on, transforming the way businesses interact with their audience. Vectara Chat is not just another chat tool; it’s an end-to-end solution designed for companies seeking to build domain-specific chatbots using RAG. What sets it apart is its ease of use and trustworthiness to your data –  ensuring a more accurate and relevant user experience.

Key Features of Vectara Chat

Vectara Chat introduces a revolution in chatbot technology, blending RAG, LLMs, and user-centric design to transform how businesses and individuals communicate. On top of the core RAG technology, Vectara chat offers chat history that incorporates previous chat into context for a more intelligent response. With RAG-as-a-service at its core, Vectara chat empowers developers to build a chatbot with high security, high relevance and reasonable cost with the following key features. 

• Interactive User Experience: Vectara Chat boosts conversation efficiency by remembering chat histories, leading to more relevant responses and improved success metrics like higher completion rates in customer support, employee Q&As and better conversion in sales, etc. This feature not only enhances customer satisfaction but also reduces costs by minimizing the need for human-operated services, benefiting both internal employees and external customers. Vectara Chat ensures a more streamlined and cost-effective interaction experience.
• Streamlined Development Process: With Vectara Chat, developing a chatbot has never been easier. Our white-label UI chat widget framework can be deployed swiftly using simple Javascript/HTML, making chatbot development accessible to all, regardless of their technical expertise in machine learning.
• Privacy at the Core: At Vectara, with end-to-end RAG, we prioritize user privacy. Vectara Chat developers have full control over their answer histories. Furthermore, Vectara ensures that it does not access the content of stored answers, creating a secure environment for users and businesses alike.

How to Create a Vectara Chat

Chat in Console

To begin with Vectara Chat, navigate to the console and choose a data corpus from the left-hand menu, or create a new corpus. Next, click on the “query” tab and enable the chat feature by selecting “chat” and turning on “enable chat”. This allows you to interact with your data directly through the console for demonstration purposes. For production use cases, please use our APIs. 

Chat via Vectara API 

Vectara offers two primary APIs: the Query API and Chat Management API. For comprehensive information and guidelines, please refer to the Chat APIs Overview documentation page. 

How to Use Vectara Chat in Your App

For integrating Vectara chat into your application, we provide a customizable UI toolkit, including “create UI” and incoming “React chat” that offers white-label UI chat widget framework for front end deployment. More detailed information and guidance will be available in upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned for these updates to enhance your application with Vectara Chat capabilities.

Conclusion

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!  Connect with us on our forums or on our Discord or on our community.  If you’d like to see what Vectara can offer you for retrieval augmented generation on your application or website, sign up for an account.