According to Cambridge Dictionary, “self-service” as a noun refers to “a system in which customers are not served by an employee, but collect goods or food themselves.” This is a broad definition that can apply to even prehistoric means of self-collection of goods or food, but the invention of the automated teller machine (ATM) in the 1960s can be considered the starting point of self-service as a general phenomenon involving modern machinery that common people must interact with to achieve certain desired outcomes.

Regarding the specific phenomenon of digital self-service, however, it can be argued that the ubiquitous interactive voice response (IVR) technology that greets phoning customers-in-need is the relevant starting point; and because IVR has as a core or traditional ingredient the synthesized human voice, IVR technically got its start in the 1930s when Bell Laboratories—yes, named after that Alexander Graham Bell—electronically replicated (not reproduced) the human voice for the first time. Specifically, their employee Homer Dudley invented the Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) during 1937–38, and the complex contraption was later publicly unveiled in 1939.

At that time, this voice synthesizing technology was not user-friendly as it required “about a year of constant practice” for someone to become an expert in producing intelligible sounds with the Voder. Thus, the technology was impractical for large-scale adoption. It was not until the 1960s, when the first call centers were created in the UK, that IVR technology—as we know it today—would become mature enough and hence, a practical fixture of inbound call centers. The automated voice menu that greeted callers started to help call center agents with managing high volumes of inbound inquiries through relatively few telephone lines.

At risk of oversimplification, the paradigm of modern computing came next in the form of the Information Age (aka the “Computer Age” or “Digital Age”), which started from around the 1980s. The Fiber Revolution began in 1977, ushering in a new era in which copper-wire transmission of simple, analog signals (representing, for example, the human voice) would be slowly overtaken and replaced in the coming decades by fiber-optic transmission of complex, digital signals; and the World Wide Web (WWW) would later be invented in 1989, thus paving the way for the eventual ubiquity of digital telephony via the Internet. The rest, as we know, is history (in the making).

Due to these mind-boggling technological advances over the last 60 years or so, there is a spectrum of possibilities in the realm of digital self-service today. The most visible forms are the consumer-centric ones such as self-checkout counters in supermarkets, but businesses and governments have also greatly benefited from digital self-service. Of course, the chatbot (and, by extension, generative AI) has been the most known and widely used manifestation of digital self-service in recent years; especially since OpenAI’s ChatGPT first exploded in popularity over the past year following its launch on November 30, 2022.

However, we at Raffle believe in a distinction between the chatbot and conversational AI. Some major differences between the two are broadness of definition (i.e. conversational AI is not just a bot), rigidity of response (i.e. a chatbot delivers available answers based on pre-written scripts), and degree of personalization (i.e. conversational AI personalizes its responses for good customer experience). For further reading, here is Raffle’s take on this distinction: Chatbot vs Conversational AI: What Are 5 Differences?

‍Discover Raffle Search and Raffle Chat Assistant, and see these statistics about the importance of better digital self-service for positive customer experience (CX). Book a demo now with a Raffle product consultant to witness self-service automation via leading AI search and chat that enable human-like knowledge retrieval for your customers and employees.