As we reported, Google recently announced new speech and NLP enhancements to Cloud Speech-to-Text and Dialogflow that can improve recognition accuracy by up to 40%, while ensuring better virtual agent performance.
To provide further insight, we decided to reach out to Inference Solutions CEO, Callan Schebella. Speaking to Callan meant we could learn more about how Google’s innovations are being used by customer service departments to provide AI-powered self-service. We wanted to understand how these incremental advancements in accuracy and performance translate into practical business value for service departments.
Inference Solutions are resold by leading telecommunications carriers like AT&T, Telstra, and Vonage as well as Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers like Cisco and 8x8. These offerings reach hundreds of enterprises with virtual agents around the world. Recently, Inference was even recognised as the global market share leader by DMG Consulting. As a well-respected voice in the UC space, Callan was in a great position to share some useful insights with us. He has a long-standing history in the industry, having spoken at recent events such as Enterprise Connect and VentureBeat Transform.
Why are Google’s updates important?
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Callan Schebella[/caption]
Google is innovating rapidly with its Contact Center AI (CCAI) framework, and with technologies like Dialogflow that underpin CCAI. This is impressive because the quality of the technology is advancing at a pace we’ve never seen before.
One reason that speech-to-text accuracy is improving is that Google is training their technology with millions of consumer interactions collected via smart speakers and devices. Google has also released text-to-speech that is extraordinarily life-like. There's also access to natural language processing (NLP) that lets consumers speak more naturally to virtual agents. Google has recognised an almost universal consumer acceptance of speech as a primary user interface and of self-service as a critical requirement for customer care.
Today, Google is leveraging its substantial resources to invest in empowering virtual agents and ensuring they can satisfy rising user expectations for high-quality customer service.
Improvements to Dialogflow like Auto Speech Adaptation and the updates to Speech Context Parameters are two examples of recent updates that support today's virtual agents. These tools enable agents to transcribe text more accurately while considering the context of a conversation for greater accuracy.
This allows virtual agents to do what humans do when trying to understand what someone is saying. For example, if you told me, “I’d like to book an appointment for an interview,” I’d expect that the rest of our conversation would be about booking that appointment. I’d then be less likely to confuse the word “meet” with “meat.” They sound the same, but given the context, I’d know that you weren’t trying to “meat” with me.
Perhaps the most critical update is that Google and other API providers have moved speech and NLP into the cloud, which is helping to reduce the cost of natural language self-service. This gives businesses of all sizes the ability to deploy applications where previously only large call centres like those used by banks and airlines could afford to leverage it.
Can you give us some real-world examples of businesses that are using these innovations?
Absolutely. Pizza Hut recently announced that they had deployed virtual agents using Google’s Cloud Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech and Dialogflow for conversational AI and Google’s mapping APIs to provide directions. This enables them to provide automated support to customers who are trying to find local restaurants and place orders.
The technology helps Pizza Hut to provide better user experience, especially for mobile consumers. With these innovations, the company can reduce both contact centre and store costs where routine inquires either incur the price of a live agent or require extra staff in a store to answer questions. You can find a case study about their project on our website.