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Google ups its AI services with new Contact Center solution and developer tools

The tech giant’s conversational platform is now turning into an intelligent virtual agent and agent helper.

Barry Levine on July 26, 2018 at 11:00 am

Google is boosting its AI-as-a-service offerings this week, most notably with the alpha release of a new Contact Center AI solution.

Contact Center AI is built around its Dialogflow development suite for conversational agents, which was launched last fall and already in wide use. Dialogflow Enterprise Edition now has the ability to build AI-powered virtual agents for contact centers, a Phone Gateway for taking calls without infrastructure, Knowledge Connectors for understanding unstructured data like FAQs and Sentiment Analysis.

In Contact Center AI, a Virtual Agent first answers the call and handles it if possible. If not, it passes the call to a human representative, who is helped by an Agent Assist system that continues to monitor the call and provide supporting info as needed. There is also a Conversational Topic Modeler to analyze topics from audio recordings and chat logs.

In outline, it sounds like some other systems already out there, but the implication is that this is a contact center offering Duplex-like capability. Google is clearly wary of the negative feedback it received when Duplex — a human-sounding bot — was demoed in the spring. Its announcement made clear that Contact Center AI will observe “best practices,” which now include telling people when they are talking to a bot.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.