Five9 Brushes Up on AI in CCaaS PlatformFive9 Brushes Up on AI in CCaaS Platform

Cloud contact center provider Five9 this week announced that it has revamped its intelligent virtual agent (IVA) development platform, added pre-built IVA applications for the health vertical, and tapped partners for integration of voice biometrics, real-time speech analytics, and agent coaching.

These updates reflect the desire Five9 sees among its customers to increase their use of conversational self-service along with live agent support, Callan Schebella, EVP of product management at Five9, shared with No Jitter via email. Five9 sees “enormous demand for IVAs as customers seek to increase automation rates to manage costs while improving the customer experience,” he added.

IVA Development, Tasks, Integrations

To improve performance and enable development of new capabilities, Five9 has rearchitected and rewritten the underlying layers of Inference Studio, its no-code IVA development platform, and also provides access to a wide range of conversational technologies from leading companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, and others, Schebella said.

That rearchitecting work included creating a media server to support VoiceXML and enable call controls, for delivery of new features like call recording, passive voice biometrics, and more, he added.

Using Studio’s visual, browser-based interface, developers can design IVA applications by dragging and dropping nodes onto a canvas to build a task flow, Schebella said. As part of the update, Five9 has optimized the interface’s task flow editor for larger canvases that can support more nodes — thus reducing the load time when building task flows. Additionally, it has applied reverse indexing to datastores, for faster loading of data, he said.

Other Studio platform enhancements include a new user interface design, a customized development process for messaging applications, and improved reporting and maintenance of IVA tasks and call flows via new dashboard, as shown below. The Studio dashboard is “similar to a contact center wall board, where you can monitor IVA usage, call volumes, and chat volumes in real time,” Schebella said.

Studio simplifies IVA development even further by providing access to a Task Library, which functions similarly to an app store and contains over 40 pre-built IVA application templates from Five9 and partners that organizations can use as blueprints for their own customized IVAs. With this week’s announcement, Five9 has added its first set of vertical-specific tasks to the library, for healthcare and health insurance providers. Tasks for other verticals, such as retail and financial services, will follow, Five9 said.

The health industry vertical suite includes tasks for appointment scheduling, health plan enrollment, FAQ, prescription management, and test results. To describe how an organization might customize one of these tasks, Schebella shared how it might add its own greeting, prompts, and set of frequently asked questions and answers to the FAQ template’s pre-configured task flow. It might also choose preferred text-to-speech voices and languages, he added.

Voice AI Partners

In a complementary move, Five9 introduced five partner solutions powered by VoiceStream, the real-time media streaming API it announced last September. These include CallMiner Alert, Cogito Dialog, and XSell HiPer for real-time agent coaching; ValidSoft VoiceID for biometric authentication; and Voci Transcribe by Medallia for real-time voice transcription.

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