The CX Summit provided a venue for Five9’s executives to highlight new service offerings to thousands of customers and partners. For those keeping score, the company has made good on the promise to blaze the “Path to AI” that Opus Research described a little over a year ago in this post. At that time we noted that Five9 was making investments in in applying machine learning and “Conversational AI” for agent augmentation.

Today, Five9 Agent Assist makes that a done deal; albeit with a big assist from Google via Google Cloud and Google Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI) technology for speech recognition and natural language understanding capabilities. We also noted that Five9 was building a framework to support virtual agents, regardless of whether their customers sought to employ “commodity” NLU/NLP from Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft or others. Five9 fulfilled on that promise as well, although this time, it is working closely with Virtual Intelligent Assistant partner, Inference Solutions as we discussed in this on-demand Webcast .

Yet the service that is likely to have the biggest impact in the long run, from the point of view of both customer enagagement and partner opporutnity, is VoiceStream. This feature of the Five9 Cloud provides real-time access to voice conversations through an “open” API, either as streamed audio or transcript. It supports an expanding set of resources for voice-based authentication, agent coaching and training, speech analytics and sentiment analysis. At CXSummit, Cogito demonstrated how it uses the VoiceStream API to capture conversations and provide coaching to agents “in-the-moment on every call.” Another keynote demo came from ValidSoft, which showcased how access to real time conversations between agents and customers can support passive, text-independent authentication. In addition CallMiner has been involved with early implementations.

Making Conversational Intelligence Accessible to More Applications

The “Web-friendly” API is “open” to partners and application developers. It can be invoked through SIP, gRPC (an open form of Remote Procedure Calls) and SIPREC (an “open” SIP-based protocol for call recording). In addition to the streams, themselves, the API offers records of call events and metadata associated with calls, as well as real-time transcripts. Five9 calls access to the API “open” but the connection to real-time audio streams is proprietary to Five9.

We will learn over time what constraints that puts on creative application developers. We just know that the companies that strive to apply Conversational AI in ways that improve both customer experience and agent productivity recognize that speech analytics and sentiment analysis are best applied in real time or, at least, in “near” real time where content can be transcribed, translated, searched and analyzed to support rapid troubleshooting of customer issues. We briefly discussed the power of the near real-time approach when describing Amazon Connect’s Contaact Lens

Applying AI-infused analytics to support call summarization and disposition percolates to the top, from the point of view of a provable return on investment, but we are just starting to scratch the surface.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants