Talkdesk and AWS: What AI and speech-to-text mean for the future of contact centers and a better customer experience

This is a guest post authored by Ben Rigby, the VP, Global Head of Product & Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Talkdesk. Talkdesk broadens contact center machine learning capabilities with AWS Contact Center Intelligence.

At Talkdesk, we’re driven to reduce friction in the customer journey. Whether that’s surfacing relevant content to agents while they’re on a call, automatically summarizing after call work, or discovering an emerging product issue that’s causing trouble, the goal is to make the customer journey more effortless. The key to reduce this friction is automatic and accurate transcription of 100% of contact center calls.

Although the core job of the contact center hasn’t changed for decades (deliver great service to customers), AI helps us do it better. It plays a central role in the delivery of these experiences. AI helps sift through massive amounts of data, connects the dots, and surfaces relevant information at the right time. In 2020, Talkdesk launched a suite of AI-focused products tailor-made for the contact center and focused on operational efficiency.

Now, we’re teaming with AWS Contact Center Intelligence (AWS CCI) solutions. AWS CCI offers a combination of services, available through the AWS Partner Network (APN), that amplify AI solutions and support AI integration in contact centers. Talkdesk joined the AWS Partner Network in October 2020.

Speech-to-text integration

For the first integration, Talkdesk now offers speech-to-text service through Amazon Transcribe. This integration represents an expansion of Talkdesk’s speech-to-text offering. It allows Talkdesk to expand to over 30 languages and accents for Talkdesk Speech Analytics and Talkdesk QM Assist products. It also expands coverage for live transcription by 11 accents and languages for Talkdesk Agent Assist.

In 2021, Talkdesk will expose all the Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Transcribe Medical features to its clients through an easy-to-use, non-technical interface. This will allow business users to customize speech-to-text using custom vocabularies, custom language models, automatic content redaction, and unwanted word filters. In addition, Talkdesk healthcare and life sciences clients can take advantage of the powerful speech recognition engine in Amazon Transcribe Medical, which supports thousands of medical and sub-specialty terms.

Expanded services

Beyond Amazon Transcribe, we also plan to make other AWS CCI services available for Talkdesk customers. That means better translation, enterprise search, chatbots, business intelligence, and language comprehension for Talkdesk customers. This fusion of technologies is a step beyond what’s in the contact center market right now. The signup process is simple: current Talkdesk customers just need to reach out to their customer success manager to get started. In the future, signing up for these features will be as easy as clicking a button in the Talkdesk AppConnect Store. Stay tuned.

Summary

We’re looking to the future of integrated speech-to-text technology, with high-quality transcription for agents to understand customers in real time and for use in performance and training management. This new integration gives Talkdesk clients a competitive edge—and a chance to transform the contact center experience into something great.

Learn more about the Talkdesk/AWS CCI partnership and how to use AI to transform your contact center by reaching out to your customer success manager.

The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

About the Author

Ben Rigby is the VP, Global Head of Product & Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Talkdesk. He oversees strategy and execution of products that use machine learning techniques to increase operational efficiency in the contact center. This product suite spans automation (Virtual Agent, Agent Assist, AI Training Suite), analytics (Speech Analytics), knowledge management (Guide), and security (Guardian). Prior to Talkdesk, Rigby was the Head of AI at Directly, where he led the development and deployment of customer service automation for clients like Samsung, Microsoft, Airbnb, and LinkedIn. Rigby graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with Honors and Distinction.