Google Unveils New AI Capabilities in Enterprise and Consumer Segments

Google launches new customer experience solutions for brands; looks to transform the audio news experience for users

Google Expands Into the Contact Center Industry

Google has expanded into the customer service industry with its latest offering – Contact Center AI (CCAI). The artificial intelligence powered solution will help brands improve the customer experience while helping contain operational costs. Google has integrated its machine learning models in speech and natural language processing (NLP) with customer service applications to support customers through these unpredictable times.

The company has already collaborated with Verizon to bring the promise of CCAI’s NLP features to their customers. Google claims that CCAI is also driving cost savings without cutting corners on customer service. “In the past, to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT), you had to hire more agents, increasing operating costs. Conversely, if you reduced the number of agents, your CSAT scores went down. Contact Center AI (CCAI) lets you have both,” writes Antony Passemard, head of product for Conversational AI.

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With CCAI, customers will no longer need to go through menu prompts or option trees – they can simply say or type their question and CCAI will find the best way to assist them. The company says customers will not be subjected to stilted speech or robot-like commands anymore.

CCAI works as an extension of a human customer-service team, assisting live agents and providing them with insights on customer interactions to drive improvements back into workflow, processes, and systems. It also allows human agents to focus on more high-value tasks in their customer interactions.

Google Unveils Dialogflow CX for Contact Centers

Dialogflow CX is the latest version of Dialogflow, a development suite used by developers to build natural, conversational experiences into mobile and web applications, smart devices, bots, IVRs, and more. The new version of Dialogflow is optimized for large contact centers that deal with complex (multi-turn) conversations and is omnichannel.  Dialogflow CX features a new visual builder to create, build and manage virtual agents. It’s available now, in beta.

Agent Assist for Chat is a new module for Agent Assist that provides agents with continuous support over “chat” in addition to voice calls, by identifying intent and providing real-time, step-by-step assistance. Agent Assist enables agents to be more agile and efficient and spend more time on difficult conversations, giving both the customer and the agent a better experience. It transcribes calls in real time, identifies customer intent, provides real-time, step by step assistance (recommended articles, workflows, etc.), and automates call dispositions.

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For customers in regulated industries, Agent Assist can remove the risk of agents providing inaccurate information (which can happen due to high agent turnover and limited training). Agent Assist can also surface the latest discount information, deals and special offers, which can be hard for agents to keep track of as this information changes frequently.

Custom Voice, also available in beta, is a new capability of CCAI and Google’s Text-to-Speech API that allows CX teams to create a unique voice for the brand across all customer touchpoints, rather than relying on a common voice shared with other organizations. CX teams can leverage custom Text-to-Speech models to define and choose voice profiles that align best with the brand without the need for voice actors or sound studios.

Google Announces New Audio News Experience

In a move to make its news section more relevant to users, Google, yesterday, launched Your News Update on Google Podcasts. This comes almost a year after the company rolled out Your News Update on Google Assistant.

The company in a blog post said that news today can become overwhelming for users as the focus shifts to more national and broader news topics. The idea behind launching Your News Update on Google Podcast was to bring high-quality, on-demand audio journalism to millions of users in the US. Podcast listeners will now easily be able to discover and listen to news that’s relevant to them.

Google delivers a personalized listening experience by analyzing audio files and applying machine-learning algorithms to uncover how people, places, and things in a story link together to relate to a user’s interests. This technology’s users discover playlists of stories that are always up-to-date and personalized for individual preferences.

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Users can also listen to local news stories on their Google Nest speakers by saying “Hey Google, play local news” or “Hey Google, play news about [a city],” and they’ll be able to hear a mix of native audio and text-to-speech local new stories.

Google’s text-to-speech capabilities have been improved by training the model on reading longer segments of text and use voice pitch, sound length, and stress on certain words to improve the listening experience. With this new technology, Google expects to convert a wealth of content to audio for listeners while making it sound more human.