Do you Need an AI Chatbot that Displays Images?
Research shows us that the human mind can process images 60,000 times faster than the same information given to us as text. We also know that people remember up to 65% of visual content three days later, compared to only 10% for text. Images will also influence buying decisions much stronger because of evoking trust and emotions.
Shopify conducted tests in 2022 where chatbots capable of displaying images would convert 12 to 25 percent higher than chatbots not having images. eBay saw similar results in an an A/B test some years ago. In addition, if you add images to your chatbot, the average order value (AOV) will increase by 9%. This implies that an AI chatbot capable of displaying images is simply superior in all regards than an AI chatbot that cannot display images.
Studies shows us that images in a customer service chatbot, such as for instance diagrams and screenshots, would reduce customer handling time by up to 30%, in addition to having dramatic effects on "self-resolution rates", where people can fix an issue themselves without ecalating to human support.
The Psychology of Images
There's a lot of reasons for the above numbers. The human mind appears to store all information as images for instance, which implies that when we are confronted with text, we have to transform the information to an image before we can store it in our brain. If you use an image instead, the information is already in a format our brain can process.
We also know that customers exposed to product images, are much more likely to make snap decisions, resulting in higher conversions. So all in all, an AI chatbot that can display images is simply superior in all regards, since it generates more sales, and results in faster understanding. This is true both for e-commerce websites and customer service / support websites.
AINIRO AI chatbots
At AINIRO we've had the capability to display images for years in our AI chatbot. This was a decision we made already back in early 2023, when we onboarded our first e-commerce customers, and we wanted the ability to display product images. You can see an example from one of our clients below.
The above image is being imported from the Shopify API, but we've also got the ability to automatically store images found during website crawling and scraping. The last part is something that took us immense amounts of energy to implement, since there's no website scraper libraries in existence that can transform HTML to Markdown while preserving images. Our solution was to build our own scraper that preserves images. Below is another image from another client of us that displays images.
In addition, our website scraper will transform HTML to Markdown when generating RAG data, which makes the RAG information much more easily "semantically understood" by the underlying LLM. To understand this effect, try to copy and paste any website content into Notepad, and read it, and compare its readability to the way the information is already displayed on your website. Obviously, everybody would agree that the Notepad version of your website is much more difficult to read. The underlying LLM will have similar problems understanding the information unless it's in Markdown format.
So by taking RAG information and converting it to Markdown format, while preserving images, we're able to have the underlying LLM receive much higher quality information, resulting in higher quality responses. This effect might be difficult to identify during the QA process, because we're not actual customers or users, so we're only verifying the factual information. But the effects of displaying images in your AI chatbot is dramatic once set into production.
Wrapping up
There's a lot of use cases that don't call for having an AI chatbot displaying images. Whether or not you need images in your AI chatbot depends upon your use case. It's also crucial that your images are loading fast, to avoid destroying the experience for the end user having to wait for large images to download. But if you need images, you should add images to your AI chatbot. The effects are simply too large to ignore. This is especially true for complex customer service and support, in addition to e-commerce settings where having product images can increase conversions by up to 400% according to Amazon.
At AINIRO we can even import images by dragging and dropping them into your machine learning type. See the screenshot below to understand how. This allows you to rapidly create an AI chatbot that displays images from your existing RAG data, and have the LLM associate specific images to specific questions, which could be for instance screenshots of your system, product images, etc.
If you are interested in hearing how we can help you with an AI chatbot that displays images, you can reach out to us below.
