Text-based communication is everywhere. Whether it’s text messaging through your phone’s messaging app or sending instant messages as a customer service agent, texting is the most popular form of communication in use today for people under 65. And it’s no surprise – texts have a 98% open rate, increasing the chances of your recipients reading your messages for more seamless communication.
In recent years, texting has grown even more effective with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), which popular programs like ChatGPT use.
ChatGPT is an AI model that can read texts and create replies that you can use to respond quicker than typing your own response. It lets you send messages that take the text’s context into account, creating a more engaging message than a standard auto-reply.
As a business, ChatGPT lets you answer FAQs and basic questions from leads and customers in less time, helping to scale your customer service and keep your sales funnel flowing. ChatGPT helps you respond to friends, family, and coworkers in a timely manner, regardless of how busy your schedule is.
If you struggle to maintain personal relationships or keep up with the customer service demands of your business, using artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to respond to text messages can help you scale your communication.
Learn how Heymarket’s AI texting features can help your team do more with messaging.
Explore AI textingUnderstanding ChatGPT’s text responses: How artificial intelligence generates text
ChatGPT is a language model that analyzes your input and generates a relevant reply based on its understanding of your request and the information it has access to. You can use it to answer questions directly, generate vast paragraphs about a specific topic, or have conversations like a human would, making it useful for a wide range of forms of communication.
How ChatGPT generates human-like responses
Language models use natural language processing (NLP) to learn how to write like a person. This process involves analyzing human writing, studying its word use, sentence structure, and tone. AI models break it down, and then using the trends it has learned, creates human-like replies. This content, known as training data, generally consists of books, web content, and other handwritten text that gives ChatGPT a wide range of sentences, topics, and information that it can analyze to help refine its understanding.
In the case of using ChatGPT to respond to personal text messages, it will look for conversations, dialogue, or other replies to similar questions relating to your prompt so it can generate a relevant reply.
How ChatGPT informs its replies
Training data also provides knowledge and context that the model uses to determine how to answer your input. It will have access to information relating to things like sporting event winners, historical presidential candidates, quantum theory, and much more. ChatGPT references this specific information when it interprets your prompt as asking about a certain topic, giving you accurate information.
In some cases, you may also provide your own training data to help ChatGPT understand your communication style or business’s brand voice by providing chat logs, product descriptions, and other unique information that surpasses the general knowledge it has natively. ChatGPT can only reference information it has access to, so if you need brand-specific knowledge or understanding, you have to provide it to the model.
How ChatGPT responds to text prompts
ChatGPT is a generative model, which means it creates replies one word at a time by predicting what should come next in the sentence based on the training data it has access to. It will determine what you’re asking for, reference the appropriate information relating to the subject of your input, and use natural language processing to formulate a human-like sentence that answers your request.
Examples of using ChatGPT to respond to texts
You can use ChatGPT to respond to text messages for a variety of different use cases. While businesses will benefit the most from the use of AI-generated responses, there are plenty of personal and professional use cases as well.
How you can use ChatGPT responses for business texts
ChatGPT is an especially valuable tool for business text messaging. Using artificial intelligence to help you run the communication channels for your business lets you do more with less and in less time. You can use ChatGPT to manually generate responses to shorten response times or leverage an AI chatbot that talks with leads and customers using ChatGPT to provide relevant answers to their questions.
Here are a few departments where ChatGPT can benefit your business:
Customer Service
77% of consumers say that resolution times are the most important factor in a good customer service experience. When you use ChatGPT to respond to text and instant messages through a business customer service platform, you’re spending less time communicating with each customer, which helps improve response times and allows you to scale your customer service. Using a ChatGPT-powered chatbot also lets you answer FAQs without an agent, enabling limited 24/7 customer service that improves customer satisfaction.
Artificial intelligence can also help to improve the consistency of your communication when you establish a brand voice in your prompt, providing a uniform customer service experience between agents that stays on brand.
Sales
The sales process is a customer-centric and communication-heavy part of business. You’re trying to convince someone to make a purchase, so it’s important that you’re available to answer their questions and engage them if the lead goes cold.
Using ChatGPT to answer texts from leads and customers lets you stay in touch with them regardless of how busy your schedule is. You can send context-aware texts in less time or use an AI chatbot to retain touchpoints with leads who are still in the decision-making process.
Marketing
While you do everything you can to make your products and services as clear and easily understood as possible, customers will still have questions. You can use ChatGPT manually or with a chatbot to create recommendations for customers who can’t decide which product to buy or answer questions about the products themselves. However, you’ll need to use product descriptions and documentation in your training data to ensure your AI model can access the required information.
How you can use ChatGPT responses for personal texts
ChatGPT-powered texting helps simplify personal and professional communication by shortening the time it takes to reply to people. If you’re busy, it can be hard to stay on top of your message inbox in between classes, meetings, or commutes. Or, if your inbox has excessive birthday or holiday wishes, drafting a reply to each contact can be time-consuming.
With ChatGPT, you can provide relevant responses to incoming texts based on what they include. You can thank your aunt for the birthday card and ask her to say hi to your cousin, acknowledge a schedule change for work, stay active in a group chat, or write a professional message to your professor to ask for a deadline extension.
Best practices for answering texts with ChatGPT
Using ChatGPT to respond to texts is both convenient and effective. However, if you want to get the best results to save as much time as possible, be sure to keep these best practices in mind.
Use detailed prompts and iterate on them
ChatGPT is extremely versatile, but it needs proper direction to optimize your results. In addition to providing the text to respond to, you should try to provide as much additional information as possible to refine the message.
You can specify:
- Tone
- Reading level
- Age
- Word count
- Format
- Emotion
- Keywords to include
- Business information
You can also tell it what to avoid, like certain words or details. For example, you could direct it to not answer questions about pricing, and then to direct the conversation to a team member instead.
Also, since ChatGPT’s ability to answer your questions depends on the training data you provide, your prompt should include instructions telling ChatGPT how to respond if it doesn’t know the answer. In most cases, ChatGPT makes up answers due to a lack of sufficient data, so when you tell it that it doesn’t need to have an answer for everything, you avoid it “guessing” and potentially providing misinformation. Something as simple as telling ChatGPT to say “I don’t know” when in these situations can make it a more consistent and reliable tool.
A detailed prompt can help you capitalize on ChatGPT’s efficiency while avoiding its limitations. When you create your prompt, test the answer it generates and use those results to further refine your prompt.
Offer the option to speak to a team member
Not everyone wants to talk to AI instead of a person. Some customers may have a hard time expressing their thoughts or questions in a way that a chatbot can understand, which can be frustrating for them.
If you’re using an AI chatbot that talks directly to customers without an agent overseeing it, you should provide the option for them to speak with a human so you can address their concerns effectively.
Double-check responses before sending
While it’s convenient to be able to use ChatGPT for text-based communication, artificial intelligence isn’t perfect. There may be some cases where the information they provide is inaccurate or entirely wrong, especially when it comes to specific information about your business that doesn’t have a lot of sources to reference.
If you’re sending your ChatGPT-generated text replies manually, always fact-check them and make sure they’re appropriate to send to a customer. If you’re creating an AI chatbot, be sure to test the bot by sending it texts for every scenario it could encounter, monitoring its responses, and tweaking your prompt accordingly.
Disclose the use of an AI chatbot
Automated AI chatbots that send texts without human approval are especially at risk for misinformation. If you’re providing specific information like refund or shipping policies that impact your customer satisfaction, a mistake from your chatbot can damage a customer relationship.
Disclosing that you’re using an AI chatbot gives the customer notice that the information may not be 100% accurate, so they can proceed with caution instead of trusting it implicitly.
Common challenges of using artificial intelligence to generate texts
ChatGPT tries extremely hard to be as human as possible – and with enough refinement, it can do a great job. However, AI also has its shortcomings that are more difficult to overcome.
Lack of contextual understanding
One area where language models struggle is a lack of contextual understanding when interpreting incoming messages and prompts. ChatGPT doesn’t have the communication experience to understand certain figurative language elements like sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, and idioms. It may misinterpret the intention behind one of these elements and use the wrong tone or address it directly, interfering with the sentiment of the message.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot you can do about AI struggling to understand context. If there is an instance where it misinterprets a message, you can provide corrective feedback to the model to help it understand how to approach the situation in the future. Alternatively, you can review each AI-generated text before it’s sent to make sure it aligns with the desired sentiment.
Limitations in humor and creativity
Emotions are unsurprisingly not ChatGPT’s strong suit, leading to a lack of emotional intelligence. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have emotions and doesn’t understand the nuance that contributes to humor, so it may struggle with generating jokes or understanding when someone is making a joke. ChatGPT also lacks imagination, which can make it harder to communicate dynamically with customers using unique brand voices.
You can avoid issues with humor and creativity by adjusting the tone of your language model to be professional, serious, or straightforward.
Improve communication at scale by using ChatGPT to respond to texts
Whether you’re looking to improve the efficiency of your business’s communication or want an easier time managing your personal inbox, ChatGPT provides you with the opportunity to scale your text-based messaging.
Businesses can improve response times, maintain a clear brand voice, and automatically address customer messages to save agents time for more complex issues. It lets your customer service, marketing, and sales teams be more efficient and scalable, helping to serve more leads and customers with fewer resources.
Individuals can improve communication with coworkers, bosses, professors, friends, and family by creating context-aware replies to messages like birthday wishes or work assignment information.
If you want to get the most out of ChatGPT, use as much detail as possible when entering your prompts and give customers the option to speak with a human to avoid lost leads. You should also always disclose if you’re using an AI chatbot and double-check responses to avoid misunderstandings. You’ll also want to avoid using unmonitored ChatGPT responses in cases where nuance and emotion are important because of its lack of emotional intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere – and it’s only going to keep evolving. Use ChatGPT to respond to text messages to keep up with the ever-growing demands of your customers and avoid falling behind.
Learn about how Heymarket’s AI texting tools help you create more personalized connections.
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