Google has promised to release a live translation tool for customer-agent conversations “soon”.
The solution will allow both parties to interact in different languages, with an AI-powered engine in the middle, translating the conversation in real-time.
It will seemingly also cover voice – alongside digital channels – with a Google blog post suggesting the tool supports customers and agents as they “talk or chat”.
Such functionality is potentially a significant differentiator from other real-time translation tools on the market, which only cover chat.
In addition, as global business operations grow and contact centers engage with people from across the world, such a tool may prove invaluable.
Yet, it may also support more local service operations. After all, 21 percent of people in the US don’t speak English at home as of 2020.
Moreover, the percentage of people not speaking the national language at home stands at 11 and ten percent in Germany and the UK, respectively – according to the Pew Research Center.
As these numbers climb higher, Google may benefit from this unique innovation, which will embed itself into the vendor’s growing agent-assist portfolio.
Alongside this, Yariv Adan, Sr. Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, also promises more sophisticated performance management solutions. He said:
We’ll also be offering personalized, continuous monitoring and coaching for ALL agents with real-time scorecards and personalized coaching and training in real-time and post-call.
Generative AI (GenAI) will play a significant role here, as it already has in expanding Google’s agent-focused innovation drive.
Indeed, it has supported the release of live transcription (including PII redaction), real-time customer responses and suggestions, auto-summarizations, and live-agent coaching.
Each of these capabilities is available in the following diagram, posted by Google:
However, its GenAI feature-release hot streak expands far beyond assisting live agents – as augmenting virtual agents with LLMs is another prime objective for Google.
Such conversational AI innovation is evident in its new AI Playbook for contact centers.
A New AI Playbook for Contact Centers
Google has embedded its Magic Quadrant leading Dialogflow conversational AI into the core of its CCaaS solution: Google Contact Center AI Platform.
By combining this with Vertex AI Conversation, contact centers can build out-of-the-box, customizable GenAI-powered virtual agents native to their CCaaS solution.
Moreover, customers can connect these to back-end systems and third-party applications with VertexAI data connectors and extensions.
As a result, contact centers can automate more complex customer queries, lighten the load on agents, and cut costs.
So, where does the new playbook come in?
“With the new playbook feature in Vertex AI Conversation and Dialogflow CX, you don’t need AI experts to automate a task,” said Adan.
Instead, you can describe in natural language how to execute specific tasks and create a playbook agent that can automatically generate and follow a workflow for you.
Adan continues by suggesting that the playbook helps businesses build bots in days and hours instead of weeks and months.
Moreover, they’re channel-agnostic, so organizations don’t have to build specific bots for mobile apps, websites, and social channels.
Customers of Google’s Intelligent Virtual Agent-Only version of its CCaaS platform – announced at the recent Google Next event – may also leverage this feature.
The new CCaaS proposition allows businesses to keep their contact center infrastructure on-premises and leverage elements of Google’s chief CCaaS offering a la carte.
For more on this release, check out our article: Google Has Released Two CCaaS Propositions in 12 Months. Here’s Why.
