NTT Communications recently announced that it will launch a cognitive agent service that will support natural conversation in both English and Japanese.
The service, expected to be released in the summer of 2016, is the product of collaboration between NTT Communications and IPSoft, a company that provides automated solutions for business operations and IT. The new system will use artificial intelligence (AI) to learn from its human interaction experiences and become better at communication.
The cloud-based cognitive agent solution will offer automated responses to customers who contact a contact center or business. The service is designed to handle the queries of people who are calling for support or to make a purchase.
Because the whole system is automated, it enables businesses to reallocate their employee responsibilities to other more mission-critical efforts while the cognitive agent service essentially handles the lion’s share of customer service.
The service also has the ability to handle routine tasks that historically have required human interaction. It can send emails, mail documents, or issue an invoice.
The solution makes use of IPsoft’s Amelia – an AI technology that will effectively “teach” the contact agent service to learn from its experiences. It also leverages an advanced Japanese-language processing technology that’s been in development for four decades.
A key benefit of the automated solution is that customers won’t have to wait on hold while an agent becomes available. Additionally, the system will be online 24/7. Add that to its natural language interaction feature and the service can be a very useful tool to improve customer experience.
If the customer’s request is unclear, the service will ask for more information to gain a proper understanding of the problem. The natural language element, though, makes it unnecessary to respond with robotic confirmations, such as “If this is correct, say ‘Yes.’”
The system will also interact freely with the customer based on the context of the customer’s query. That stands in contrast to traditional systems that follow a predetermined dialog tree.
In the event that the contact agent service is unable to understand the caller or determine the nature of the problem, it will forward the call to a live agent.
Before launching the service, NTT Communications will invite other companies to participate in a Proof of Concept (PoC) experiment in February.