Google LLC said at its Cloud Next’18 conference today it’s updating its Dialogflow Enterprise service with new features for contact centers that can help to automate simple, common interactions.

Dialogflow Enterprise is a cloud-based service based on technology that the search giant obtained through the acquisition of API.AI Inc. in 2016. The service, which was announced in November before being made generally available in April, can be used by enterprises to create virtual assistants without having to build from scratch the complex machine learning technology such projects normally require.

With today’s updates, the platform suddenly becomes a lot more useful. Google said the idea is to free up contact center workers from mundane and repetitive tasks, so they can focus on providing better assistance where and when it’s needed.

In a blog post, Google product managers Dan Aharon and Daryush Laqab said they were adding new features to Dialogflow and also an entirely new service specifically for contact centers that incorporates its features alongside other tools.

Dialogflow’s new features are all being released in beta, and include a new Phone Gateway function that allows virtual agents to be assigned a phone number and start taking calls right away, without the need for any new telephony infrastructure.

“All of the telephony infrastructure, speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language understanding and orchestration are managed for you automatically so you won’t need to stitch together multiple services to build a phone application,” Aharon and Laqab said.

Dialogflow’s new Phone Gateway feature

More interesting, perhaps, are the new Knowledge Connectors, which are used to link virtual assistants to important company documents. That way, the virtual assistants can “read” unstructured documents such FAQs or knowledge base articles, and respond to caller’s queries using this knowledge.

“The added information extracted from your knowledge is seamlessly blended into your Dialogflow agent, saving the need for complicated integrations between multiple tools,” Google’s product managers said.

Other new features for Dialogflow include automatic spelling correction, text-to-speech capabilities, and sentiment analysis, which Google says can be used to flag situations when it might be desirable for the virtual agent to hand over to a human.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said the Dialogflow updates are interesting because this kind of progress allows enterprises to build next-generation applications that can differentiate their offerings.

“Extending the value chain is one use case, and contact centers play a key role in customer relations,” Mueller said. “So making it easier for enterprises to build next-gen contact center applications is a key focus and growth driver for IaaS vendors because speech and voice recognition, and more advanced search and AI all drive load (aka revenue) for them.”

Contact Center AI

Google said Dialogflow is proving to be a very useful tool for thousands of customers already and these new additions should make it even more appealing. However, the company said it’s still not enough for some enterprises, which need to integrate analytics with their customer support services. For these customers, Google is introducing a brand-new service called Contact Center AI, which incorporates additional artificial intelligence-based tools.

Contact Center AI’s most important extras include an Agent Assist system that uses Ai to provide human agents with information relevant to the call they’re on, including suggested articles and shortcuts to help them fulfill tasks relating to the call. And for more general analytics-based insights, there’s also something called a Conversational Topic Modeler, which analyzes historical call and chat logs to discover information and trends that could be used to develop a more sophisticated virtual agent or help with human agent training.

Perhaps the best thing about Cloud Contact Center is that it can be setup relatively easily, as it integrates with existing telephony infrastructure from major providers including Cisco Systems Inc., Twilio Inc. and others.

Mueller said these partnerships could be important as most companies realize they could never establish these kinds of systems alone:

“CxOs know that they cannot build these application with the traditional on-premises capabilities,” Mueller said.

Images: Google