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AWS Amazon Connect adds genAI for the contact center
The tech giant unveils generative AI capabilities, reminding CX competitors that it has a long history with conversational AI and can offer many intelligent customer service tools.
AWS on Tuesday unveiled new generative AI capabilities for Amazon Connect, its public cloud contact center service.
These capabilities include the implementation of Amazon Q, Amazon's new generative AI assistant, as well as new tools for Contact Lens, Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect Customer Profiles.
Amazon Q in Amazon Connect helps agents by recommending responses to customers' queries in real time. Contact Lens provides post-call summaries of each customer call. Amazon Lex lets customer service teams create self-service chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. And Amazon Connect Customer Profiles enable CX teams to create unified customer profiles to provide more personalized customer service experiences.
The vendor introduced the new capabilities at its AWS re:Invent 2023 user conference being held from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1 in Las Vegas and virtually.
Amazon Q in Connect is available as a preview release. Amazon Lex in Connect, and Amazon Connect Customer Profiles are all generally available now. Amazon Connect Contact Lens is in preview.
Highlighting AWS' history with AI
AWS' new generative AI offerings for Amazon Connect highlight its long history with AI, according to Opus Research analyst Dan Miller.
"Conversational AI has long had inroads into contact centers and Amazon Connect is no exception," Miller said.
Conversational AI mixes different AI technologies including natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding and natural language generation to enable computers to understand human language.
Advanced algorithms, which make decisions based on a large amount of data, support Contact Lens, Amazon Connect's set of machine learning speech analytics tools that surface customer insights. NLP, which also enables computers to understand natural human language, supports Amazon Lex, which lets user publish voice or text chatbots to mobile devices, chat services and web apps.
"AWS, because its server farms are the home for most of their competitors, wants to let the world know that it has a lot of experience with conversational AI and that it has proven services for its contact center customers to implement right now with the understanding that there are a lot more to come," Miller said.
"It is obligatory for serious candidates for market share in the cloud-based contact center world to flesh out their generative AI offerings," he added.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky highlighted Amazon Q's capabilities for customer service during his keynote.
"This is going to give contact center agents a major assist. Agents can chat with Q directly inside of Amazon Connect to help them respond quickly to customer questions," Selipsky said.
Generative AI populating the contact center
With the addition of these new generative AI capabilities, including Amazon Q, the generative AI assistant, Amazon is answering a call for more AI technology in the contact center, according to Miller.
Such capabilities are already included in platforms from a slew of independent competitors vying for customers in the contact center software market, including NICE, Verint, Five9, Cresta, Uniphore, Zendesk, Talkdesk and others, including Zoom, Miller said.
They include generative AI-supported tools for NICE's CXone Enlighten AI; Verint's DaVinci AI for natural language search; and Five9 in Agent Assist 2 from Five9, supported by AI startup OpenAI, a partner of AWS rival Microsoft.
"Adding Agent Assist and LLM-powered profile creation shows that Amazon Connect’s customers are asking for these capabilities," he said.
Amazon Q will be available for purchase in two plan options: Amazon Business for $20 per month per user, and Amazon Builder for $25 per month per user. Amazon Q is currently available in preview. During the preview period, Amazon Q capabilities are available within AWS services at no charge.
Mary Reines is a news writer covering customer experience and unified communications for TechTarget Editorial. Before TechTarget, Reines was arts editor at the Marblehead Reporter.
