Watson Assistant is Evolving (again!)

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning” — Benjamin Franklin

Watson Assistant has always been a pioneer in the chatbot market (though we prefer to call them assistants). We’ve continued to evolve our product over the years from what started as a stateless developer API (see below) — with all of the frustrations and challenges of building an external application around that — into a holistic customer care product designed to solve customer and employee challenges — the first time.

This is what building an assistant used to look like (lots of custom components in a complicated environment)

2020 was a year like no other. In particular, customer and employee services were challenged in unimaginable ways with lockdowns going into effect, remote work becoming the norm, and historic call center volumes pushing agents to their limits. Let’s take a look at how Watson Assistant has evolved to meet the daunting market challenges that await for 2021 and take a look at our updated pricing.

This is what building with Watson Assistant looks like now (simplified architecture with pre-built, enterprise-grade components)!

1. Getting to first contact resolution

As contact centers and help desks continue to deal with historic call and chat volume, it should come as no surprise that resolving questions quickly and successfully — the first time — is one of our biggest priorities as a product. When it comes to solving the problem of poor first contact resolution, it comes down to two critical challenges: getting users to engage and successfully understanding their question.

When it comes to engagement, here’s how Watson Assistant can become a tool your customers actually want to use:

1. Phone, SMS, and WhatsApp integrations: Watson Assistant now supports phone, SMS, and WhatsApp natively through our product. And with the phone integration, clients can quickly deploy a voice assistant as a modern replacement to a legacy IVR (through their existing telephony provider)! Plus, our speech services (which are automatically provisioned when you create a voice integration) come with natural sounding voices that we created through the use of advanced AI.
2. The best intent recognition model: If you’re going to understand your customers without using hundreds or even thousands of training examples you better have some good AI. Watson Assistant was recently shown to provide the best intent recognition accuracy among major competitors including open source products. That means Watson Assistant will help you understand your customer's questions without needing them to always “try phrasing it in another way” as with some chatbot vendors
3. Home Screen & the webchat client: We previously released a webchat client to help our clients quickly deploy an assistant to their website. But it’s not always easy to understand what a virtual assistant can help with. That’s why we introduced Home Screen to go along with the webchat client. Home Screen allows clients to display a welcome message along with common intents the assistant can help with to guide users. In internal testing, we found that Home Screen drove a 50% increase in engagement on the first interaction.
4. Even better automation to get to the right question: Even with great AI, sometimes users can ask questions in a convoluted way. Watson Assistant has always had disambiguation to help guide users to the right place. But we’ve now added even more enhancement with Suggestions. Suggestions uses AI to understand when a user is stuck and proactively offer suggestions for intent or questions they may be interested in

Put together, all of these new features (plus ones that have been around for a while like disambiguation and the webchat client) help ensure that Watson Assistant is an engaging experience your customers actually want to use with the AI to ensure you’re able to understand them — the first time.

2. Solving the fragmented customer care tech stack

Businesses and organizations are and should be investing in best-of-breed tools that work for their business. They shouldn’t be forced to choose applications or tools because they work with their chatbot. Watson Assistant has been designed as an open ecosystem so that our clients can connect to the tools, systems, and applications they’ve already invested in.

But in addition to this open ecosystem, clients increasingly need the ability to orchestrate the end-to-end experience. If you’re using a bot platform as just a developer service/middleware, this leaves you on the hook for creating a big, complicated orchestration app: mastering all of the channels/systems you need to connect to, managing the state of the conversation, and much more. Now, Watson Assistant has evolved to handle way more of this for you!

1. Pre-event webhooks: Our new pre-event webhooks are a core part of our ability to orchestrate the entire user experience. With pre-event webhooks, you can now manipulate information before it hits Watson Assistant. This is critical for use cases like removing PII data, user authentication, and language translation.
2. Post-event webhooks: We’ve also added post-event webhooks, which means you can now orchestrate systems or modify responses just before they reach the end user on a channel.
3. Logging webhooks: All of your conversational data can now be sent as events via a logging webhook — this allows you to more easily use and analyze your data in other tools or warehouses (in real time).
4. Content crawlers: The search skill provides responses from your existing content sources, and can crawl all sorts of data sources like web pages, PDFs, Sharepoint, Box, Salesforce, etc…
5. Escalate to agents via service desk integrations: In addition to our out-of-the-box service desk integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk, we’ve expanded to help our clients connect to other leading customer care platforms for live agent hand-off. With bring your own service desk, we offer pre-built code packages to help integrate to Twilio Flex, Genesys Cloud, and NICE inContact. Plus, we offer base code to help make integrations to other customer care platforms.

To learn more about all of our orchestration capabilities, head to this post.

3. Scaling beyond simplistic FAQ bots

While solving the problems of first contact resolution and a fragmented customer care tech stack is critical, clients also need a way to scale their virtual assistant to increasing complex use cases. These use cases typically involve multiple variations that will depend on specific user input.

1. Actions: We’ve recently released Actions in beta. Actions is a dramatically simplified way to build out conversational flows inside of Watson Assistant. Instead of needing to transverse between intents, entities, and dialog; now all of the core functionality has been built into one page. Actions improves on the visual editor available in our dialog builder today and will include additional functionality like the ability to deliver rich media back to users.
2. Coverage & containment metrics: The addition of coverage and containment metrics to our analytics section of Watson Assistant gives clients the ability to better analyze the performance of their assistant. Coverage will signify if you’ve built out the right intents to handle the questions your users are actually asking while containment will give you a view into how often your conversations are getting escalated to an agent.
3. Autolearning: With Autolearning, you can automatically improve user responses over time and create a more efficient and accurate assistant with minimal effort. Autolearning learns from disambiguation clicks. When a user selects a given option in disambiguation, Autolearning uses that input to update the underlying weights in our machine learning model for intent recognition. Over time, this will result is more accurate responses from your assistant back to users.
4. Language expansion: We’re constantly working to improve the number of languages we support with Watson Assistant. We’ve released new support for our intent recommendations feature in French, German, Italian, and more. You can check out all the latest languages currently supported in Watson Assitant here.

Our New Pricing

As we’ve evolved, we’re also updating our pricing to reflect that evolution. The new features we’ve released have collectively reduced the total cost of ownership of Watson Assistant compared to other vendors. Now, clients can build a robust virtual assistant on any channel, seamlessly connect to back-end systems and applications, orchestrate the end-to-end experience, and scale to virtually any use case.

Here are the specifics on what’s changing on March 1st, 2021:

Plus Plan: Our Plus plan will start at $140 per month with 1,000 MAUs included ($0.14 per user). Additional MAUs can be purchased for $14 per 100 MAUs. To get started with the phone integration, it’s a simple add-on charge of $9 per 100 voice MAUs ($0.23 per user with digital & voice combined). And you don’t have to deal with the per-minute speech charges separately — it’s all included in the price!

Enterprise Plan: We’ll also be launching a new Enterprise plan as an evolution of our Premium plan. Enterprise will come with everything in the Plus plan with higher limits, additional enterprise features (like the options for data isolation and HIPPA-readiness), and a more cost-effective price than the Plus plan at higher volumes.

Look out for additional communication and information on March 1st, 2021 as the Enterprise plan and the new pricing goes into effect!

Come check out the new features today. New customers can get started for free with our Lite plan or Plus plan trial! Happy building!