Digital assistants need to be properly implemented in order to achieve their goals, and until now contact centres struggled with this for a number of reasons.
It’s just too complicated. Contact centres can be cloud-based or they can have everything stored locally. Systems can be old legacy systems that companies have had for a long time. It’s not easy to just pipe in a bot and have it work the way you want it to.
That’s because contact centres have different configurations for receiving calls and how they’re routed. Plus, even the newer CCaaS call centres aren’t completely open. Most CCaaS players have their own bot frameworks and so make integration of other frameworks and platforms purposefully challenging. All of this makes integrating a digital assistant into your call centre a non-trivial task.
AudioCodes has now solved these problems with its Voice AI Connect Cloud. You can think of it as the glue that stitches any type of conversational AI platform or framework to any type of contact centre. No matter which conversational AI service a bot was built in – such as Google’s Dialogflow, Amazon’s Lex or Cognigy – you can now connect it to any call centre.
That’s a game changer. What was once a huge technical feat can now be done without using any code!
Ilan Avner, AudioCodes’ Director of Product Management joined Kane Simms of VUX World on a live webinar to show how easy it is to connect a voicebot to any call centre in Voice AI Connect Cloud.
Connect anything with anything
There’s a lot of options for building your bot out there, and each has its advantages. For example, Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems are not all created equal. Some are better at specific languages than others. Google’s ASR is best at capturing addresses, but Microsoft Azure’s is often seen as the best for capturing a varied input, as would be used in a full conversation. This creates a dilemma for teams who are trying to build their bot – what if we need one system for one conversation and another system for another?
AudioCodes aims to solve that with Voice AI Connect Cloud. The aim was to create a self-service portal where you can speak with your bot in just a few clicks, and “connect anything with anything”.
All the frameworks are there
You can literally connect any bot framework to any voice engagement channel. You also have complete control over the routing of calls and how you integrate with the contact centre. Your bot can be connected with your telephony channels. You can select from different Text To Speech (TTS) systems.
Ilan says that it generally takes a few days to implement a new provider, so if a customer wants to connect to Amelia for example, then just put in your request. There’s great flexibility available.
You can connect it all
In a word – streamlined!
During the webinar, Ilan showed how streamlined Voice AI Connect Cloud is in operation, including how to configure custom SIP connections to enable your digital assistant to connect to contact centres hosted on premise or in the cloud. This SIP integration is another non-trivial feat for typical bot deployments. Ilan gave a demo in which he purchased a phone number, connected his bot to Genesys Cloud, called the bot, and finally, his call was transferred to a human agent.
What stood out is how easy it is to select your components, define the bot’s capabilities, and then route the components together. The routing from bot to agent during the call is incredibly fluid. The handover feels natural and smooth. Every stage of a call can be monitored, and there’s access to the call list and transcripts. And, all of the context from the conversation is able to be passed to the agent, so that the agent can pick up where the bot left off. Again, a non-trivial task usually.
With Voice AI Connect Cloud call centres can quickly pull a solution together using various components. This means no more worrying about the technical detail of integrating complex conversational AI systems into call centres.
The potential to tweak goes much further when you consider outbound calls, multiple language bots, answer machine detection, and there’s even an option to connect fax!
For the user, the process seems incredibly simple, however in the background there’s a lot going on.
A no-code marvel
The illusion of simplicity
In order to create such a streamlined tool AudioCodes had to get legacy VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to talk to modern HTTP, they had to deal with the various protocols and codecs that each vendor uses, they had to ensure that synthesised voice quality never suffers (the perceived quality of a voice bot dips massively if the synthetic voice is poor), and they had to ensure the customer’s security and privacy is respected.
All of this had to work without disruption to the teams who will use it. As Ilan says “holistic customer support requires the integration of voicebots with existing business processes.”
Try it for yourself
It looks like AudioCodes has created an incredible solution with Voice AI Connect Cloud, that allows teams to build exactly the solution they need.
