To paraphrase Isaiah 11:6, sometimes “a little start up shall lead them.” That’s the case as Minerva CQ, a start-up that specializes in “real-time collaborative intelligence for the enterprise” announced that a major player in the EV Mobility (think “charging”) world is deploying its solution to help customer support agents quickly understand and respond to customer comments and queries. It represents the first commercial deployment of NVIDIA’s Riva Enterprise, a packaging of the GPU Giant’s Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Conversational AI resources.

The deal marks a coming out party for Minerva CQ, whose software platform listens as customers use their own words to tell a speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) about the purpose of their call. It then uses that information to populate an agents screen with suggested wording or actions to take to resolve the customer’s issue when the call is transferred to a live agent. At that point, the system takes an approach that CMO Daniel Hong terms “Waze in the Customer Service Space.” It stays on the line and listens to every word and provides further suggestions based on natural language understanding and sentiment analysis.

At the end of the call, the Minerva’s home-grown natural language generation (NLG) resources creates a call summary that can written to “systems of record” that include Salesforce, Zendesk, Servicenow, Microsoft and Oracle. The summary can be integrated into quality assurance and agent training programs and can also speed up post-call workflows by recognizing specific triggers for follow-up. This approach supports agent coaching during the conversation as well as post-call actions that speed the process of resolving recognized issues.

Validation for NVIDIA’s Approach To Conversational AI

NVIDIA has been the beneficiary of explosive growth in Enterprise AI ever since software developers determined that the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) it developed for gaming and the computer-generated imaging (CGI) that infuse today’s blockbuster movies were also well suited for machine learning, speech processing and natural language processing. In May it rolled out Riva 2.0, calling it a “world class speech AI SDK” that provides developers with tools to customize voicebots and speech-based applications that take advantage of highly accurate speech recognition in seven languages and text-to-speech rendering of both male and female voices.

Riva’s product managers focused on internally developed deep learning and neural models to support “generic” applications. They encouraged ISV (independent software vendors) to pursue vertical opportunities by employing their TAO Toolkit to create custom implementations. Minerva is a customer of NVIDIA Riva Enterprise is a packaged offering that packages Riva, TAO and enterprise support.

Rapid, Accurate NLP and NLG Achieving Commodity Status

Expect to see lots resources with the capability to capture 100% of the conversations between companies and their customers. Minerva CQ will grow its footprint in the emerging green energy field and will find commonalities with a broader community of utilities and telecommunications companies. Expectations among developers and customer experience professionals, alike is building as Minerva CQ, NVIDIA and their Conversational AI cohort show how easy it is to integrate their technologies into customer and agent workflows and achieve positive business outcomes.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants