Recently, IBM Launched new AI and automation capabilities in IBM Watson Assistant. With this system, businesses can provide customers with enhanced experiences on mobile phones, the web, SMS, e-mail, and any other platform where customers communicate.
Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM, said, “One critical challenge facing nearly every business today is the need to better communicate with their customers and employees across all channels. We’re continuously delivering new innovations in natural language processing, automation and advancing responsible AI, and building a strong, open ecosystem with partners like IntelePeer to help businesses transform customer care with Watson Assistant.”
IntelePeer, a leading Communications Platform-as-a-Service company, has been collaborating with the company to set up and test a voice agent, and a new agent app that ensures a seamless handoff to a live agent without losing context.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), IBM is enhancing Watson Assistant, the company’s intelligent virtual assistant, to help businesses more effectively address customer issues. With Watson Assistant, customers will be able to get relevant responses more quickly over the phone, SMS, web, or any messaging platform, and seamlessly transfer to a live agent when additional assistance is required. Among the new features are:
Watson Assistant now offers voice capabilities :
With the IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service, users of the Plus and Enterprise plans can use Watson Assistant to quickly establish voice functionality and a phone number for a virtual agent. IntelePeer can connect Watson Assistant with existing phone systems using industry standards if a business already has a contact center phone system. Watson Assistant now works with nearly all contact centers using SIP protocols by using IntelePeer, so no coding is required to implement Watson Assistant within a half hour.
The Watson Assistant Search Skill feature helps customers resolve issues on the first contact :
The Search Skill feature of Watson Assistant now offers short-answer retrieval based on an innovative question-answering (QA) system developed by IBM Research. The agent will be able to return an answer – in a few words – based on longer sentences or passages and provide context on where the answer came from. In Search Skill, FAQs can also be extracted. The feature allows administrators to constantly update the virtual agent with relevant information from broader sources, instead of constantly doing it manually.
Provide seamless hand-off with Watson Assistant’s agent app :
This new agent app feature from Watson Assistant is designed to help customer service agents pick up where the virtual agent left off with a customer. IBM’s speech detection models, which are designed to deliver more accurate transcriptions right out of the box, provide a near real-time transcription of a customer’s conversation. The new agent app displays the latest transcripts right on the screen of the customer service agent when the hand-off occurs. As a result, customers don’t need to repeat their questions again, and agents are able to resolve issues even faster.
