Google's work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has allowed companies to grow by leaps and bounds with its deployment giving Google products an edge over the competition in almost all areas. However, the company has kept its distance from deploying AI to facilitate jobs, until now.
On Tuesday, the search giant announced that it was deploying AI systems into call centres to facilitate customer interaction in a partnership with several companies, notably Cisco and Genesys.
The software is called "Contact Center AI" which will install "virtual agents" that will be the first to pick up the phone when a customer connects to a call centre.
"When the customer asks something that the AI cannot do, it will automatically forward the call to a human," said Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist at Google, during the Cloud Next conference late on Tuesday. "Our true goal is to empower a contact centre's human agents, as well as the customers that rely on them."
"To do this, we built a complete solution with our partners that includes Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, as well as additional capabilities that are particularly useful for contact centres," Li added.
In this AI technology, when a call is placed, the caller is immediately greeted by a Virtual Agent that answers questions and fulfils tasks all on its own. When a caller's needs surpass the Virtual Agent, it transitions to a human representative.
The result is a flexible solution that adapts to the needs of each and every call, and provides a seamless experience between live and virtual agents, playing as big or as small a role as the situation demands.
"It's compliant with our data privacy and governance policies, and it does it all without infrastructure, on a platform that scales as much or as little as you need," Li noted. "AI is empowerment, and we want to democratise that power for everyone and every business -- from retail to agriculture, education to health care," she added.
Interestingly, Google earlier denied deploying AI to call centres after it debuted Duplex during the I/O 2018. The system, which can mimic a human voice was shown off by Google to allow users to book reservations and tickets on Android.
