Welcome to the SoundHound Smart Answering Getting Started Guide.
This guide will show you how to quickly create an AI voice assistant using Smart Answering’s AI. SoundHound Smart Answering uses advanced AI techniques to automatically capture and organize information specific to your business and feed it to your voice assistant — so you don’t have to. And so your voice assistant can get to work quickly.
Here’s what you’ll find in this guide:
- How to set up your AI voice assistant demo in minutes with Smart Answering’s AI
- Understanding the AI Knowledge Base and the Knowledge Meter
- Introduction to Smart Answers and Smart Actions
- Testing and listening to your voice assistant
For a quick overview of how to get started, watch this video:
Keep in mind that while your voice assistant will improve with use, your unique knowledge of the business contributes to an engaging experience. As you go through getting started, note how you refer to your products or services, your business’ style, and the type of greetings customers hear. Your thoughtful input will help create a seamless, fun, and helpful experience.
Set Up Your Voice Assistant in Minutes
It only takes a few minutes for Smart Answering to build a custom AI voice assistant demo for you. If you haven’t signed up for an account, visit https://smart-answering.soundhound.com/signup. You input your phone number to collect information from Google Maps. If you are not on Google Maps, not to worry! just click the button beneath to skip the connection.
Enter your website and Smart Answering begins training your AI by analyzing your website and organizing the information that powers your AI voice assistant.
Input information that is critical to your business, such as the Business Name, the Address, and a Phone Number (Optional).
You'll first arrive to the new Dashboard Page:
The Dashboard page gives you key steps to a successful launch, offering you quick navigation points to personalizing your greeting, editing your AI Knowledge Base, testing the assistant, and enabling call forwarding. Once you complete the 4 steps, the top "Welcome to your Smart Answering Dashboard" section becomes replaces with the AI Knowledge Boosters or recommendations section.
Beneath the Welcome section, you'll see the dashboard analytics which provides quick, actionable insights based on the calls coming through the assistant. The metrics can be described as follows:
Total Callers - how many unique callers in a given time period
New - how many first time callers
Returning - how many repeat callers
Queries Answered - the number of total questions answered by the assistant
English/Spanish - toggle between conversations that happen in either language
Today/Date - a selection of date ranges that you can view
Next, you’ll see your AI Knowledge Base:
AI Knowledge Base
When onboarding, Smart Answering uses SoundHound AI to understand, populate, and manage the AI Knowledge Base, which is a web page that displays all the knowledge required to answer your callers’ requests, grouped into business categories, such as hours, location, policies, products & services, and more. The individual editable knowledge items are known as Labels.
- Labels can:
- Provide Smart Answers (Answer Labels) to the caller and/or
- Perform Smart Actions (Action Labels) during a call
Smart Answers provide information to the customer that best satisfies the customer’s query, such as “What hours are you open?” or “Is there parking?”
Smart Actions or Transfers and Customer Self Service take an action or “do something” to help the customer with their requests, such as sending an SMS link to an appointment-setting page. Or routing a customer’s request to speak with the owner to the owner’s mobile phone.
We’ll focus here on how you can set up Smart Answers to respond to caller inquiries. In a separate guide, we’ll show you how to use Smart Actions.
*Carefully review the knowledge base that Smart Answering has built. Information pulled from your website, for example, may be outdated. Or you may have new information to include. One of the advantages of Smart Answering is that it’s easy to update and customize as your needs change.
Knowledge Meter & AI Knowledge Boosters
Notice the SoundHound Knowledge Meter in the upper part of your screen. Just as LinkedIn uses the Profile Level Meter to measure the completeness of a person’s profile, the AI Knowledge Meter helps to gauge the voice assistant’s completeness.
Keep in mind that either filling in a Label that’s marked ‘unknown’ or removing it will increase the Knowledge Meter. Look for a future article where we’ll discuss other tips for how to increase the Knowledge Meter percentage.
For now, be aware that anything over 80% is good to launch your voice assistant.
As calls come in through the assistant, Smart Answering will provide recommendations to consider adding to your Knowledge Base in order to maintain an optimal assistant. Please note: this feature is still in beta and could provide mixed results.
Testing Your Voice AI Demo
Your AI demo is now ready to test. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to review and personalize the information, but we suggest you get a feel for the voice assistant:
- Test your voice AI demo by clicking on the blue icon on the bottom right of the screen or calling the number at the top.
- Smart Answering answers and you should hear the welcome greeting from the voice assistant.
- Ask the assistant a few questions and listen to how she responds. You might ask “what are your hours today,” “how do I get to your business,” or “is there parking nearby.”
How does the voice assistant respond? Keep in mind that this is only a quick demo to start the ball rolling. See below for next steps.
Next Steps
Now that you’ve created your first AI voice assistant demo, hopefully you’ve gotten a sense of how simple it is to create a voice assistant driven by voice AI and how powerful it can be. SoundHound Smart Answering offers many more features to help you create a highly effective voice assistant that can answer 100% of your calls.