One of the highlights of G-Force, the global event where Genesys Labs brings together its community of customers, partners, consultants and analysts, was a presentation of the newly launched AppFoundry delivered by Jim Kraeutler, Sr. Director of Innovations and AppFoundry impresario. With a hat tip to Saleforce.com’s AppExchange, Kraeutler described a very lively marketplace that is already populated with over 70 cloud-based products, platforms or services from over 30 unique partners, representing 8 different categories.

As of November 3, the category called “Assisted Service” featured the most product listings (25) including the most provocatively named service:  KickAAS, for automated generation of agent scripts.  It is also the home category where Genesys’ joint offering with IBM Watson has a home, promising “chat sessions powered by IBM Watson’s cognitive computing resources.” Here you will also find tools for caller ID and authentication from Anana, NuID and iProov (facial recognition), as well as a number of platforms that support video-based, automated interactions.

Of special interest to those of us following intelligent assistance and intelligent authentication. Under the “Knowledge Management” tab, visitors will find two core offerings from CreativeVirtual. V-Portal(tm) and V-Person(tm). The first is a suite of capabilities that span knowledge management and analytics, required to create enterprise virtual assistants while the latter can be thought of as the family of virtual agents or avatars that carry on commercial conversations.

The “Self-Service” tab is also one with a wealth of offerings from luminaries in the Intelligent Assistant domain. It is where you will find products, services, APIs and integration points that bring the likes of Nuance, Pindrop Security, SpeechStorm, Anana and Verbio, along with Genesys’ own resources to support customer identification and verification, multichannel “journeys,” human-like and even “empathetic” CX products and services.

All in all, it is a great step forward in Genesys’ effort to open its CX platform to “DevNation” consisting of large third-party software providers, including Microsoft (Skype for Business), Nuance and IBM as well as aggressive “niche” players with products and services that provide significant pieces to the Intelligent Assistant and Intelligent Authentication ecosystem.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: customer experience, intelligent assistant, App Exchange, App Developer, Genesys