Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) providers are fight a long-term battle against becoming commodities. Adding Intelligent Assistance capabilities now takes center stage. The latest case in point is this announcement from NICE InContact officially adding Omilia’s “conversational AI” capabilities to the roster of products and services available through its CXexchange. The services offered include “conversational customer care” for both voice and digital channels, voice biometrics technology to support the banks passive and “dynamic conversational authentication,” and “advanced speech analytics” used to hone responses from both live agents and virtual assistants.

Omilia, a Greek tech company specializing in Intelligent Assistance, has been on a roll of late. Royal Bank of Canada, the sixth largest bank in North America, is deploying its technology to power its customer care virtual agent. David Kapauan, the banks lead architect of contact center technology, will present a case study at our Conversational Commerce Conference in London May 8-9. NICE InContact’s announcement further raises the company’s profile and distribution options by putting making its core technology an offering on its marketplace for microservices and other technologies to run on the CXone customer experience cloud.

Rising Above the Noise in the Marketplace

A virtuous cycle is being created among CCaaS providers and the community of 3rd Party Solutions providers. NICE InContact’s competitor, Genesys, for example, has used the term “blended AI”, the KATE framework and App Foundry as a mechanism for inclusion as they add capabilities and services. On the CXexchange, Omilia joins 10 other “Omnichannel Virtual Assistants”, including Cognicor, Inbenta, SmartAction and Brand Embassy, all of whom are positioned on the Opus Research Intelligent Assistance Landscape.  In addition, there are several firms that weren’t on our radar, including IMIConnect (Chatbot engine), Lumen AI Assist (text analytics of chat transcripts), Passage AI (NLP/NLU platform) InSync Assistant (beta) andIM.Mind (from InteractiveMedia). 

Adding Omilia to its CXexchange brings NICE InContact some formidable capabilities to support conversational virtual assistance that span that includes voice, as well as text based interactions. As RBC determined, Omilia is one of the few voice processing platforms that also includes “passive” voice-based customer authentication, based on its own voice biometric software. But as the majority of developers in Salesforce’s AppExchange or any application marketplace for that matter, membership is just the beginning. The next step is to get exposed to a deal stream and to achieve success with key clients.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles