Interactions LLC has announced a set of innovations that represent the integration of the AT&T Watson platform (now branded as Curo™) along with a customer engagement and go-to-market strategy designed to disrupt the interactive voice response (IVR) landscape. The new offer is the culmination of successful assimilation of the AT&T Watson technology and staff, which were brought into the company in a transaction that was completed in November 2014. The Curo speech processing and voice biometrics portfolio will be marketed as a highly-affordable (meaning aggressively priced) alternative for companies pursuing a “speech-only” approach to phone-based customer service. It may then serve as an entry point for Interactions to introduce existing customers to their “Adaptive Understanding” resources to support a broader set of applications, use cases and business objectives. It is a win/win situation as customers discover ways to employ Interactions’ breadth of product and capabilities in ways that control costs and enhance customer experience.

Beyond the new name for the speech-only resources, the company has expanded the Adaptive Understanding capabilities and the iCenter infrastructure (the magic that employs live agents in the background when needed to understand what a caller is saying and choose the appropriate response) to support chat, text messaging and outbound Virtual Assistant solutions. It also will provide tools and personnel to simplify the process of migrating to the Curo and Adaptive Understanding platforms to support a unified, multi-channel or omnichannel care strategy.

Believing that speech recognition is becoming a commodity of sorts, the company has a strategy to enter the market with aggressively priced speech processing resources that do not require an entirely new platform. Then it is ready with “human-assist” plug-ins that can bring the iCenter infrastructre into the mix. Solutions can be implemented as a fully-hosted, managed service; as an “on-demand” cloud-based offering on 100% on premises. Such changes can be incremental (and affordable) in nature, but profound in their long-term impact. Interactions also took the opportunity to announce the formation of a partner network, anticipating a major role for Value Added Service Providers (VASPs), BPOs, resellers and other alliances. It is definitely evolving into a customer- and partner-friendly platform for Intelligent Assistance across multiple channels and modalities.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: customer experience, Interactive Voice Response, intelligent Assistants