Introducing Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction

Today I am happy to announce the availability of Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction. This solution brings Watson Assistant’s AI capabilities into call centers, allowing end-users to talk to Watson over the phone.

You may be thinking “I thought IBM already had this capability in the market?” and you are right — we have had the ability to bring Watson Assistant to call centers for a few years now — Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction is a unification of the separate capabilities which had previously needed combining as separate products, making it easier to purchase, deploy, and manage.

So what can I use Watson for in call centers?

Deploying Watson Assistant over the phone is not that different from deploying it on web pages or in mobile apps. As an enterprise AI you train and configure Watson for your use case so that it can interact with end-users in a natural, conversational fashion.

The same is true when deploying Watson Assistant into call centers. End users talk to Watson using natural language to resolve a query or request that they have. These conversations can range from simple questions, such as asking for basic product information, to more complex conversations — such as opening insurance claims. By providing the same capabilities over different communication channels (web, app, email, social, phone, SMS) you ensure a consistent end-user experience. This ensures that your call center can provide the same user-friendly experience as your other channels.

Benefits

• Reduce the number of calls transferred to call center agent s — this saves end-users time, and reduces the cost for calls which are handled by Watson
• Reduce the length of calls — nobody likes spending time on the phone to a business. The faster you can get callers to their desired outcome the happier they will be
• Provide a consistent customer experience over phone, web, mobile app, and more
• Improve end-user satisfaction — no more menus, no more trying to figure out exactly what choice to make. Simply talk to Watson in natural language and have it answer your query quickly
• Enhance your existing call center with AI while keeping your current deployment. Connect Watson to your existing systems instead of replacing them.
• Ensure that if end users do need to transfer to a human agent that they transferred to the best one. Watson knows why someone called it can send them to the right place the first time. No more bouncing from agent to agent!

Hear how Watson is helping Humana and their end-users within their call center

Features

• Interact with end-users conversationally, instead of forcing them to have to navigate a series of telephone menus
• Personalize interactions with callers. If you recognize who is calling by their phone number have Watson greet them by name, instead of treating them like a stranger
• Trainable speech — you can train the speech to text capabilities for your business to improve accuracy. Train it on the language used, and provide example audio to build a customized speech recognition model unique to your business
• Neural speech synthesis — Watson’s voices have evolved over the years and are now better than ever with our latest DNN technology. If you haven’t heard Watson’s voice in a while I’d encourage you to go and try it for yourself!
• Blended SMS and voice conversations. Connect Watson to supported messaging APIs to allow it to send and receive SMS messages from an end-user while still talking over the phone — all as part of the same conversation. Let’s be honest — you don’t want to have things such as web links read out over the phone when it could be texted to you instead.

Deploying Watson in your call center

When looking to deploy Watson for your call center there’s a whole host of different options available:

• Deploy in the IBM Cloud in minutes — connect it to online SIP providers or to your on-premise or cloud-based call center systems
• Deploy on-premises or on third party clouds
• Connect to your existing call center system or SIP trunk provider. Any existing call center system that supports SIP can transfer calls over to Watson

If you’d like to learn more about using Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction to improve your call center, you can find more information by clicking the phone tab on the Watson Assistant pricing page.