From a surge of generative AI enhancements to a popular CCaaS platform to the return of a stalwart CX event, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Amazon Connect Gets a Generative AI Face-Lift, New Digital Channel Features
AWS has released new generative AI-powered features for Amazon Connect, its CCaaS platform.
Each new feature builds on existing applications within Amazon Connect and comes at no additional cost until March 2024.
Moreover, they leverage the LLMs available within Amazon Bedrock – which hosts models from various big-name vendors, such as Anthropic, Cohere, and Meta.
AWS teased many of these in September when highlighting how generative AI (GenAI) could improve agent-assist, manager-assist, and customer self-service experiences.
Now, it has packaged these up and hard-launched four of them during the AWS re:Invent conference – as unpacked below.
Amazon Q In Connect
AWS has released a new, customizable GenAI-powered virtual assistant – "Amazon Q" – across its tech stack.
Q allows employees throughout the organization to gain fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, solve problems, auto-generate content, and take action.
Those employees include contact center agents, who can now leverage Amazon Q in Connect. (Read on…).
Google Teases Real-Time Translation for Contact Centers, Releases an AI Playbook
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.
According to the Pew Research Center, the figure of people speaking the native language at home stands at 11 and ten percent in Germany and the UK, respectively.
As these numbers climb higher, Google may benefit from this unique innovation, which will embed itself into the vendor’s growing agent-assist portfolio.