VoiceAI Connect

The conversational Voice AI hub that accelerates building enhanced voice bot applications
and connects them to any telephony channel.

Overview

In the last few years, dramatic leaps forward in machine learning and AI have driven a revolution in the way enterprises boost engagement with their customers. These incredible advances mean that businesses can now utilize conversational AI (chatbot) technologies offered by various providers to automate their customer service departments and train bots to give callers a high level of service whenever they get in touch.

Most current bot implementations are text-based. However, adding voice and telephony channel connectivity to an existing chatbot enables companies to implement voice-based use cases, leveraging on the investment made in AI and user experience optimization for the chatbot and provide the same experience in voice engagements. They can use virtual agents to communicate with customers, replace their legacy IVR system with conversational IVR and use bots as agent assistants to optimize agent productivity, resulting in exceptional customer satisfaction and a significant drop in customer support costs.

Voice-Bot Use Cases

There are three main use cases for voice-bots:

• Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) – Offloads simple and repetitive tasks from live agents to voice-bots. It allows live agents to concentrate on more complex customer interactions, reduces hold time and improves the customer experience without increasing the number of agents. If the interaction cannot be completed by the bot, the call will be transferred seamlessly, along with the relevant details, to a live agent for completion. This solution is characterized by high scalability, a high return on investment and an exceptional user experience.

• Conversational IVR – Legacy Interactive Voice Response (IVR) allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system using DTMF tones inputted via a keypad. It is usually a long and tedious process, which has a detrimental effect on the customers’ user experience. Conversational AI-based IVR uses natural language understanding to replace hierarchical menus with a free speech experience. It ascertains the customers’ needs and instantly routes the call to a virtual or live agent. The solution saves time, is more accurate and improves the user experience.

• Virtual Agent Assists – The bot assists contact center agents by listening to conversations between customers and agents, analyzing the data and sending real-time insights to the agents or their supervisors. The insights can be utilized to guide the human agents through the process of handling customer inquiries and suggesting relevant answers. It optimizes agent productivity and enhances the user experience. Customers are not aware of the AI tool’s involvement.

Voice-Bot and Telephony Connectivity Challenges

Most bot frameworks offer connectivity to various text engagement channels. But although some offer voice APIs, none of them supply native telephony connectivity. Therefore, enterprises and other solution providers that want to implement voice-bots and connect them to telephony will encounter the following challenges:

• Telephony system integration

• Voice quality and voice latency

• Multiple speech providers and bot frameworks

• Adjusting the user experience to the voice and telephony channel

  • Using events and data that come from telephony such as the calling number, caller name, any customer data that was gathered by a contact center in previous interactions, dialed digits (DTMF) and more.

  • Initiating activities that are relevant for telephony by the bot such as escalation to a human agent, adding metadata to the contact center session context and recording the call.

  • Adjusting the bot user experience to the voice medium. On one hand, eliminating inputs that are not relevant to voice, like visual menus, emojis and images; and on the other hand, adjusting the bot to handle situations that do not happen in chat interaction, such as caller interruptions and no user input.

• The bot developer control – Bot developers are accustomed to controlling all the application aspects using no-code/low-code coding, flow editors or simple HTTP-based APIs. Therefore, it is advantageous for bot developers to use a solution that provides similar APIs when integrating with the telephony world.

AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect

AudioCodes, a leading provider of advanced communications software for the digital workplace, directly addresses this key market need with its innovative VoiceAI Connect solution. Utilizing AudioCodes’ vast voice expertise, VoiceAI Connect creates a bridge between any bot framework and any telephony system based on a best-of-breed approach that allows you to pick the best provider for each of the voice cognitive services.

As illustrated in the diagram above, VoiceAI Connect acts as a hub that connects different telephony channels to various bot frameworks and voice AI cognitive services, enabling secured, highly available and scalable architecture on all sides of the solution.

VoiceAI Connect contains two main components:

• Voice Engagement Controller – Based on AudioCodes market-leading enterprise session border controllers (SBCs) architecture, the Voice Engagement Controller integrates with the telephony channels. In this way, VoiceAI Connect can integrate with any telephony channel, public telephony provider, contact center or enterprise communication platform as well as any platform communicating via WebRTC.

• Cognitive Services and Bot Framework Orchestrator – This component interacts with the various cloud services and implements the best-of-breed approach by adapting to any cognitive service and orchestrating speech-to-text, text-to-speech and bot framework voice flow. It can connect to various bot frameworks such as Microsoft Bot Framework, Google Dialogflow and Amazon Lex. It also exposes public APIs that that can be uses to connect with any other bot framework or middleware. Many bot frameworks have already used these APIs to integrate the solution into their bot frameworks.

VoiceAI Connect Benefits

On top of the fundamental capabilities of connectivity to any telephony channel, bot framework and speech services, the VoioceAI Connect solution has additional important benefits that improve any voice-bot solution:

• Smooth integration – The solution easily connects any telephony system to any bot framework. Because a single vendor performs the telephony and cognitive services integrations, successful implementation and best performance is much more likely.

• Voice quality and voice latency – VoiceAI Connect is the only solution today that relies on SBC architecture with direct connectivity from the telephony systems to the speech engines and bot frameworks. This minimizes the number of media hops and delivers excellent voice quality and minimal voice latency.

• Best-of-breed approach – VoiceAI Connect offers a list of certified speech engine providers (text-to-speech and speech-to-text) that bot developers can choose from to meet their specific needs. The solution also provides public APIs that enable it to be integrated with any other speech engine.

• Reduce traffic to speech services – Based on the SBC’s ability to detect silence and voice, and stop and start speech-to-text detection accordingly, VoiceAI Connect can reduce the traffic and cost of the speech-to-text service by up to 40%. For text-to-speech, the solution implements a caching mechanism that reduces both traffic and the cost of this engine and also minimizes voice latency.

• Multiple deployment options – VoiceAI Connect is offered in two variations to suit any deployment option and to provide highest possible flexibility for the bot developer.

VoiceAI Connect Editions

AudioCodes offers VoiceAI Connect in the following editions:

• Live Hub: a self-service portal for connecting and orchestrating multiple enterprise voice communications services.

• VoiceAI Connect Enterprise: a fully managed service, where AudioCodes is responsible for installation, software upgrades, configuration, integration, and active monitoring.

For more information, click here.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

VoiceAI Connect complies to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• Live Hub: For more information on GDPR support, click here.

• VoiceAI Connect Enterprise: For more information on GDPR support, click here.