Google has promised to release a live translation tool for customer-agent conversations "soon".
The solution will allow both parties to interact in different languages, with an AI-powered engine in the middle, translating the conversation in real-time.
It will seemingly also cover voice – alongside digital channels – with a Google blog post suggesting the tool supports customers and agents as they "talk or chat".
Such functionality is potentially a significant differentiator from other real-time translation tools on the market, which only cover chat.
In addition, as global business operations grow and contact centers engage with people from across the world, such a tool may prove invaluable.
Yet, it may also support more local service operations. After all, 21 percent of people in the US don’t speak English at home as of 2020.
Moreover, the percentage of people not speaking the national language at home stands at 11 and ten percent in Germany and the UK, respectively - according to the Pew Research Center.
As these numbers climb higher, Google may benefit from this unique innovation, which will embed itself into the vendor’s growing agent-assist portfolio.
Alongside this, Yariv Adan, Sr. Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, also promises more sophisticated performance management solutions. He said:
We’ll also be offering personalized, continuous monitoring and coaching for ALL agents with real-time scorecards and personalized coaching and training in real-time and post-call.
Generative AI (GenAI) will play a significant role here, as it already has in expanding Google’s agent-focused innovation drive.
Indeed, it has supported the release of live transcription (including PII redaction), real-time customer responses and suggestions, auto-summarizations, and live-agent coaching.
Each of these capabilities is available in the following diagram, posted by Google:
However, its GenAI feature-release hot streak expands far beyond assisting live agents – as augmenting virtual agents with LLMs is another prime objective for Google.
Such conversational AI innovation is evident in its new AI Playbook for contact centers.