Google Introduces Dialogflow Mega Agents

A sweeping set of updates aimed at enhancing user & developer experiences

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Contact Centre

Published: April 1, 2020

Moshe Beauford

Moshe Beauford

Google Cloud recently announced a series of updates to Dialogflow, a development platform that streamlines the process of building chatbots and interactive voice responses (IVR) for contact centers. The technology is the primary inspiration for Contact Center AI, which lends access to virtual agents for repetitive and basic customer interactions, an attempt at removing some of the monotony out of the agent experience.

Google said organizations can now increase the number of seats of virtual agents from 2,000 to 20,000 with its latest feature, in beta, Dialogflow Mega Agent. This delivers a drastic overhaul to the agent experience on many fronts and could help reduce the burden likely felt as call volumes soar to all-time highs amid COVID-19 concerns.

So, how’s it work? Previous versions of Google’s Dialogflow agent was limited to 2,000 intents. The Mega Agent essentially combines ten agents forming what Google calls a mega agent. In more practical terms, this means, if you have a virtual agent dedicated to orders, it relies on multiple agents to perform simultaneous tasks such as answering queries about balance and ETAs, creating a bot that can essentially multitask.

 

What this does is create a more seamless and natural conversation, not something typically associated with virtual agents that often have long response times and can present not-so-useful information when someone needs reliable information most.

Google isn’t just rolling out Mega Agents, the company’s also offering Dialogflow Agent Validation, now generally available. The software finds virtual agent shortcomings in real-time, providing such data could lead to necessary contact center tweaks made in real-time to enhance the customer and user experience.

The company also announced Dialogflow Versions and Environments are also generally available, which gives developers the tools to publish agents in different environments, including testing, development, staging, and production to run the gamut of possibilities before virtual agents start assisting real customers. Dialogflow Webhook Management, an API designed to let developers create and manage queries quicker, is also now GA, Google said.

According to Irwin Lazar, Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes, he’s studied enterprise plans for chatbots in the company’s 2019-20 Intelligent Customer Engagement benchmark. The analysts found that replacing agent interactions with chatbots could save organizations, between 50 and 90 percent of the cost of a live agent.

“We’ve found that chatbots are most useful for simple transactions, and that benefit for complex transactions is limited by high development costs”

He added, by improving the ability to create agents that can handle more complex interactions, Google should offer customers the ability to further expand the use of chatbots, providing an additional opportunity for cost savings, and potential improvements in customer experience.

For me, this is all a part of a greater conversation. Often experts say AI will not replace humans, and I agree. But Google’s latest move is just a sign of what AI is capable of, and how we have to continue to define the roles of humans and AI so the technology merely makes the job of humans easier and does not attempt to recreate the Turing test.

ChatbotsCpaaSDigital TransformationInteractive Voice ResponseUser Experience
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