Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. Leading off this week, we highlight: The general availability of Amazon Q from AWS; a new generative AI feature in Amazon Connect's Contact Lens; Talkmap's Gen AI updates to its TalkDiscovery platform; new APIs from RingCentral for AI, video and social media, as well as a workflow builder.
Also, Qualtrics launched several CX-specific solutions based on its Qualtrics AI Assist product; Avaamo launched an agent assist product for the contact center; and, SymphonyAI debuted a Gen AI copilot targeted at employees and IT staff.
Lastly, in the one piece of non-AI news, Calendly introduced a new Web browser extension that helps streamline meeting workflows.
Announced in late 2023, Amazon Q is now generally available. Amazon Q is a generative AI-based assistant. It is available in two broad categories: Developer and Business.
Amazon Q Business can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in enterprise systems. Q Business:
Amazon Q Developer assists developers and other IT professionals in several ways. First, Q will generate code suggestions and recommendations in near real time while developers are coding. Customizations are private and the underlying foundation model does not use them for training.
AWS noted that one of its customers, BT Group, said it accepted 37% of Q’s code suggestions while another, National Australia Bank reported 50% acceptance rates. Q can leverage a customer’s internal code base to provide more relevant and useful code recommendations.
Q has another capability, called agents, which can autonomously perform various tasks, such as implementing features, documenting and refactoring code, or performing software upgrades. For example, a human developer can ask the agent to implement an application feature and the agent will then analyze existing application code and generate a step-by-step implementation plan. The human can then review and iterate on that plan before the agent implements.Lastly, Q Developer can scan code for vulnerabilities and suggest remediations. It will also help IT professional optimize and troubleshoot their AWS environment.
Check out analyst Sheila McGee-Smith’s thoughts on what Amazon Q brings to Amazon Connect (published in December 2023).
At Amazon Connect’s Contact Center Day, AWS announced a new generative AI feature in preview in Amazon Connect Contact Lens. The new feature provides managers with generative AI-powered recommendations for answers to questions in agent evaluation forms. Managers receive additional agent behavioral insights (e.g., did the agent show empathy while delivering bad news?) and will get context and justification for the recommended answers (i.e., reference points from the transcript that were used to provide answers).
These gen AI-powered recommendations are built using Amazon Bedrock and are available in the US West (Oregon) and US East (North Virginia) regions in the English language. During preview, this feature is included with Contact Lens performance evaluations at no additional charge. To learn more, visit Amazon Connect’s documentation and webpage.
The provider of generative AI-powered contact center solutions announced version 8.3 of its TalkDiscovery platform. The new release introduces two new generative AI platform features: Conversation Summaries and Contact Intents. Contact Intents is a standalone data attribute that is generated for each conversation. It identifies the customer’s “main reason” why they contacted the contact center. Note that this is in addition to the platform recording all turn-level customer intents. Conversation Summaries have been supported by TalkDiscovery for several years; this new version is a revamped approach to generating those summaries.
The AI-driven UCaaS, CCaaS, video and hybrid event solution provider made several announcements, including new RingSense AI APIS with which customers can generate audio and video transcriptions, summarizations, and speaker diarization (attributing audio segments within a recording to individual speakers) across RingCentral and third-party generated recordings.
RingCentral’s new video APIs and SDK will allow developers to integrate live video meetings and interactions into their applications through a white-labeled experience with built-in customizability, closed captioning, and chat. With the social messaging APIs, can integrate with nine different social media platforms (all the major ones). These new APIs are available in beta to RingCentral Video Pro+ and RingEX customers, free of charge.
The new RingCentral Workflow Builder allows customers to create workflows from pre-built or custom templates. The pre-built templates include automatic, canned responses for out-of-office replies, SMS keyword autoreplies, voicemail received notifications via SMS and after-hours SMS autoreplies. These new capabilities can handle more complex triggers, for example creating automated, personalized responses to an exact phone number match of an incoming SMS message or transcribing a voicemail to trigger actions based on its content.
The experience management solution provider announced its Qualtrics AI-powered Frontline Locations, Frontline Digital and Frontline Care solutions. Underlying these several CX related solutions is Qualtrics AI Assist, a platform-wide Gen AI agent that allows users to ask natural language questions about data and receive a response based on a company’s own data. Qualtrics AI Assist can generate summaries and trigger workflows.
Qualtrics Frontline Locations Assist is a hub that analyzes customer feedback – from surveys, within apps, the contact center, online, and reviews – to provide frontline managers with insights and recommended steps to improve customer experience.
The Qualtrics AI-powered Frontline Digital solution provides similar insights but for a Web site, such as heatmaps, funnel analytics and real-time frustration ‘interception’ which enables business to identify customers experiencing challenges with the company’s site in real time and offer targeted support in the moment.
Qualtrics Frontline Care includes Customer Care Assist, which aggregates insights and workflows across the customer care experience which a manager could use to generate per-agent coaching plans. It also uses Qualtrics AI to automatically summarize customer feedback which frontline teams can use to generate support tickets, send follow-up emails and/or create knowledge base articles.
Qualtrics Frontline Location Assist is available in private preview, as are the Digital solutions. Qualtrics Customer Care Assist is in private preview and Automated Call Summaries is generally available today.
The autonomous agent platform provider for customer service operations launched its Avaamo Agent Assist Copilot which uses generative AI throughout the call to:
Agent Assist Copilot joins Avaamo’s Suite of Generative AI tools, including LLaMB, Avaamo IVA, Avaamo Outreach, and Avaamo Live Agent.
The predictive and generative enterprise AI SaaS provider unveiled Apex Enterprise IT Copilot, a generative AI-based assistant for end users, IT analysts and executives. Depending on the type of end user, the copilot will provide self-serve assistance via knowledge articles, work prioritization, insights around trends, and more. The copilot is part of SymphonyAI Apex, a predictive and generative AI-based IT service management/enterprise service management platform. The copilot and Apex are powered by SymphonyAI’s Eureka Gen AI platform.
The centralized scheduling automation platform announced a new Calendly web browser extension for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, and a similar add-in for Outlook. Via a new meetings tab (pictured below), users can see all meetings in one place, view contact details and meeting history, schedule meetings on behalf of a team member, and book meetings from the extension without task- or app-switching. The extension is available here.
In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:
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