Vonage APIs have enabled organizations to build customer engagement experiences in their applications for several years. Some of these implementations require developer expertise within the organizations and many of the ideas are not executed due to the lack of developer resources. Vonage AI Studio enables every individual (developer or non-developer) in an organization to prototype and deliver customer engagement experiences faster using a visual drag and drop builder.
This blog will introduce you to Vonage AI Studio, why you should choose AI Studio, the general use cases, and finally, how to get developer preview access to Vonage AI Studio.
Imagine a world where traveling is acceptable and enjoyable again. You are ready to fully immerse yourself in your vacation and you are calling the hotel to add a few more days to your stay. Before you can talk to anyone, you are being placed in an IVR queue “... For Barkley Hotels in Hawaii, please press 8. For Barkley Hotels in Toulouse, please press 9”. After having accidentally misclicked and being transferred to the wrong location, you are being placed in a queue waiting for a live representative to assist you. Good start to a relaxing time off, right?
Outdated IVRs, long call queues, and no one to talk to. This is still the reality of many businesses even in 2021. While creating a rather unsatisfactory customer experience, they are missing valuable insights into their customers’ needs and behavior. Needless to say that this has their live channels overflowing with inquiries.
To harbor this information, increase efficiency, and guarantee every customer the experience it deserves, businesses will need to step up their game and improve the way they communicate with their customers.
Vonage AI studio is a Low-code/No-code conversation designer that empowers developers and non-developers alike to design, create, and deploy customer engagement applications that operate in natural language. Vonage AI Studio can work with multiple channels and can connect to multiple sources for building an omni-channel customer engagement experience.
Underlying Vonage AI APIs offer Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and Text to Speech (TTS). The Vonage APIs offer multiple engagement channels over voice and messaging to support various AI use cases over Vonage AI Studio.
The AI Studio is divided into multiple parts. The building canvas (as seen in the picture above) and the building blocks of the conversation that we call “Nodes” are on the left navigation panel. Each of them has its own purpose, and together they create the conversational flow.
The Nodes guide the conversation, such as giving out simple straightforward responses or collecting input from the caller. An action node like the webhook node can easily send API requests to retrieve and send values to third-party services. If your flow requires it, you can also send an SMS or route the call. Lastly, a variety of general and custom reports help you gain insights into your virtual agent's performance.
Context Switch empowers conversation by having the ability to "jump" between intents and parameters without the need to follow a predefined route. Chosen intents will always be available when analyzing a user input.
The Counter node allows you to modify the flow according to the number of times it was triggered. This enables conversation designers to create more complex flows, and create dynamic effects with less repetition.
There are many conversational AI design platforms in the market and choosing a provider is not an easy task. Vonage AI Studio is not just another conversational AI design platform as Vonage AI Studio offers the following to our customers.
Vonage AI Studio offers not just a drag and drop conversation designer but the complete package as there is a Graphical User Interface (GUI), support for multiple communications channels, and our own Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with the ability to engage the customers end-to-end.
The core of our solution is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversation designer, which is built on Vonage AI's proprietary NLU algorithms to enable human-like conversational interactions. In other words, our customer engagement applications are able to communicate in natural language, and don't require users to formulate their questions in a specific way, use certain keywords, or choose from a set of options.
The Vonage AI Studio is built to serve advanced interactions in a natural way. The goal is to eliminate those "I'm sorry, can you please repeat that?" or “Please rephrase” prompts, and instead provide an innovative approach to conversation design. When combining several nodes in a row, you can create life-like interactions that minimize friction and conversation abandonment rate.
Vonage AI Studio has the ability to understand the effectiveness/success of customer engagements by tagging the happy and unhappy paths in a conversation. Customers will be able to track/report the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and take actions based on the KPIs. The constant monitoring of KPIs allows us to optimize the NLU and have more effective customer engagements in natural language.
Vonage AI Studio has AI conversational design experts, who understand the elements of natural language interactions and design customer conversations efficiently. AI conversational design experts offer several tutorials, training programs, and webinars to keep our customers up-to-date on best practices during the Developer Preview period.
Let’s touch on some use cases. When a customer calls a business, they want to get the job done as quickly as possible. Vonage AI Studio can help you build conversations that do exactly that. You can build AI-enhanced self-serving interactions that engage every customer in natural language.
You might have probably experienced poorly designed IVRs at least once in your life where you are asked to press digits and wait endlessly through the IVR tree to reach the correct department or service. Using AI Studio, you can directly ask the customer requirements in natural language and route the customer calls to the appropriate service avoiding delays and frustration.
Did you receive your flight delay information as an SMS or WhatsApp message? AI Studio can connect to your CRM and send periodic updates to customers about their travel.
Would you like to automate the frequently asked questions (FAQs) and save the time of your customer support agents? Vonage AI Studio can help you build virtual assistants that can answer FAQs and escalate to human agents when absolutely necessary.
Would you like to book a dentist appointment on a weekend or offline hours? Vonage AI Studio can build applications that can take care of offline scheduling and appointments for your customers.
Are you waiting for your parcel and want to change the delivery time? Vonage AI Studio can build applications that can track the parcels and interact with you to change the delivery time or place.
Sounds interesting? You can now request developer preview access to AI Studio. This will enable you to experiment with AI Studio and build/deploy/iterate on your cool ideas.
You can sign up here and have fun exploring!
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Binoy is a Senior Product Manager for Vonage Video API, with over 10 years of Telecom and real-time communication experience as an Engineer, Researcher and Product Manager. Binoy is leading the AI initiatives and works towards bringing AI insights in every customer interaction. He lives in Helsinki (Finland) and loves to do product mentoring in his free time.
