MOLLY PALM: Hi, Molly Palm here from the Google Cloud Analyst
Relations team, joined by Antony Passemard, head
of product for conversational AI,
and Shantanu Misra, product manager for CCAI.
Today, we're excited to talk about the incredible innovation
around our complex center AI portfolio,
including the launch of Dialogflow CX.
Antony, can you please share a little bit more about what
we're announcing today?
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Of course.
Thank you, Molly, for having me.
First, I'll want to clarify a little bit what
CCAI stands for.
CCAI stands for Contact Center AI.
It's bringing the best of Google's conversational AI
to Contact Center.
The portfolio is composed of three components--
Dialogflow, which addresses the needs of customers
for automation of interaction for self-service channels
or routing calls or chat to the right agent.
Agent Assist, which provides real-time assistance
to Contact Center agents for voice and chat
channel through smart recommendation
of documents or answers.
And finally, we have an upcoming Conversation Insights platform,
which allows Contact Center managers to analyze everything
that's going on in their contact center.
So with that portfolio, we're today
really excited to announce the most important and exciting
improvements to this CCAI portfolio, which
is called Dialogflow CX.
It's a completely new multichannel bot platform.
It's focused on large and complex enterprise use cases.
With Dialogflow CX, customers can get the best of Google's AI
to power the Contact Center and lower their operational cost
and while improving the customer experience, which
is very important.
MOLLY PALM: Fantastic.
And what makes Dialogflow CX different from other offerings
on the market?
SHANTANU MISRA: Dialogflow CX is a completely new platform.
And it's a result of several years of learning,
of working with some of the most complex contact
centers in the world.
What we realized was that Dialogflow Essentials, which
is our existing platform, is massively
popular among the developer community,
with over a million developers using it.
But what we realized was, for the most complex use cases
with large enterprises, we needed
to provide our customers with more flexibility, more ways
in which they could manage the bot end-to-end, and also
experiment with different flow options.
And everyone was expecting Google
to deliver the best of breed in terms of an elite experience.
And that's why we came out with Dialogflow CX.
In terms of innovation, Dialogflow CX
comes up with a completely new intuitive
UI, which can handle the complex use cases very, very easily.
As an example, for a customer like Verizon,
one of their common use cases is their user base
traveling internationally and looking
for an international plan.
But during the conversation, their user
can't say, oh, by the way, what about my existing plan?
Can I make changes to it, so that international travel
becomes more affordable for me?
Now, such a use case would be very
difficult to handle in Dialogflow Essentials
or in existing conversational AI platforms
because these minor detours or supplementals
are just not handled well.
Dialogflow CX does a great job of gracefully handling
these minor detours and then coming back to the main flow
and fulfilling the request.
The second big innovation in Dialogflow CX
is the ability to support 20 plus languages
while having the same conversational AI
design serving all those different languages.
So for some of our customers, like TOT,
which is telco in Thailand, or KLM airlines in Netherlands,
where they want their conversational AI
application to talk in multiple languages,
they can easily just set it up in one language
and expand it to others without having to redo the work.
The third important innovation that we're introducing
is just the scale it supports.
For a customer of the size of a Fortune 10, Fortune 20
companies, they need the ability to handle thousands
and thousands of intents.
With Dialogflow CX, you can now support 40,000 intents
and up to 20 independent flows which
serves the needs of the really large enterprises, allowing
their teams to work independently
on these independent flows, supporting
the massive amount of intents that we do support,
while also retaining the benefit of sharing
the common NLU across this entire massive agent, which
is just something very unique in the market.
MOLLY PALM: Fantastic.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about some of the specific capabilities of Dialogflow CX?
SHANTANU MISRA: As I mentioned, when
we were designing the unique capabilities of CX,
we really had the large enterprises in mind.
So some of the key features that we focused on,
A, was the omnichannel implementation.
We wanted to make sure that Dialogflow CX is
the answer to all the conversational AI
needs within the enterprises.
So you have to build it once, and then you
can deploy it across your telephony and contact centers,
across your SMS channels, across your social media web channels,
mobile chat, et cetera.
The second big innovation we're introducing
is this completely new visual builder,
which makes the job of conversational architects very,
very easy.
We realized that one of the biggest friction in introducing
a conversational AI application is just
the amount of effort and time it takes
to develop the bot, which is significantly shrunken because
of Dialogflow CX.
The other innovation we're introducing
is the ability to manage your bot deployment end-to-end.
Right now, we see customers maintaining their own custom
softwares to do things like AB experiments or DevOps,
their CI-CD pipeline, all of which
is taken care of in Dialogflow CX.
So once you adopt Dialogflow CX, you
don't have to develop any custom software anymore.
The fourth important innovation that we are introducing
is the security and reliability that backs Dialogflow CX.
We know Dialogflow CX is formed of very, very important B2C
conversations which are happening for our customers.
And with features like VPC, which
allows customers to link even their on-prem back-ends
to their Dialogflow, or with features like regionalization
and CMEK, which allows customers to manage their encryption
keys, we're ensuring that Dialogflow
passes the litmus test of security
for all of these enterprises.
MOLLY PALM: And what about Dialogflow ES?
The community loves this product.
Are we planning to continue supporting it?
SHANTANU MISRA: So Dialogflow CX is, as I said,
targeted towards enterprises and their complex use case.
Dialogflow Essentials is not going anywhere.
The way we see it is, currently, there
is a large part of the industry which
is satisfied with FAQ-like or 1, 2, 3 turn bots, which
is handled very well with Dialogflow Essentials.
So if a customer comes in with very simple needs,
then Dialogflow Essentials works for them.
But for any enterprises which requires more robust support,
has teams working in multiple geographies who
want to collaborate on the same bot,
or has very complex bot needs in general,
Dialogflow CX is the right solution for them.
MOLLY PALM: Great.
And Dialogflow ES was based on turns for chat and minutes
for voice.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about the Dialogflow CX pricing model?
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Yeah.
Actually that was a big ask from our large customers.
They needed more visibility into their Contact Center spend.
Most of those large contact centers,
they have to deal with a budget that they get for the year.
And they need to adjust their operational cost
around or within this envelope of money that they get.
So what customers were telling us
is that Dialogflow ES was extremely hard to forecast.
What the contact center knows is how many sessions
they get, how many chat sessions or call they receive per year.
And the model on a per turn, per minute,
or per 15 second increment of Dialogflow ES
was extremely difficult for them to deal with.
So Dialogflow CX, thinking about the customers
and talking to them, really changed that.
And we went to a very simple and predictable pricing model,
which is based on sessions.
So a voice session has a price, and a chat session has a price.
And that's it.
All the value of Dialogflow CX, including make an agent,
which was an option in ES, the advanced
based NLU, the sentiments core, the intuitive UI,
the visual UI, the experience, all
that is included in the session price.
So customers really love that because they
know exactly how much they're going to spend for the year
or how much they're going to need for the year.
And they can optimize their cost around that
by trying to either put more into the automation
or more toward the agent assistance technologies.
MOLLY PALM: That's great.
Now, tell us a little bit more about broader CCAI customer
adoption.
Where are we seeing the most traction?
Can you share a few customer use cases?
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Of course.
And we talked about a few already,
but CCAI has been one of the fastest growing portfolio
within Google Cloud.
We benefited from, one, a high level
of maturity of the product.
And Dialogflow Essential was used by many, many customers.
And we had a lot of experience there in working with customers
to build CX.
So we benefited from the maturity of the product.
But at the same time, we also benefited, unfortunately,
from the COVID pandemic, which drove a massive wave
of digital transformation.
And one example is the state of Illinois.
Within two months of the pandemic, the state of Illinois
had to deploy the CCAI bot for their unemployment benefit
agency.
And they were able to successfully serve
hundreds of thousands of new requests that
came in a matter of weeks.
They were really overwhelmed and were
able to deploy the CCAI to serve that.
Another example would be in Australia,
we work with a customer called Aptos, which deployed CCAI,
and we're now expanding our partnership with them.
We talked about TOT in Thailand for APAC.
So you're seeing that deployment being
both on the use cases and verticals,
but also regionally in APAC and other regions in the world.
So great adoption, great growth that we're seeing with CCAI.
SHANTANU MISRA: Yeah.
And with Dialogflow CX, we're announcing the GA launch today,
but it has been in the works for a while
now, as an example, Verizon, who launched their first bots
on Dialogflow CX last spring.
So it has been in the works for a really long time.
We had a really long EAP program,
then a long public preview.
And even when the pandemic hit, we
were ready to handle millions of calls per month.
So the release today is extremely stable and mature,
in fact, a lot more mature than some of our other products
in the past.
MOLLY PALM: Great.
And now, tell us, how can someone
get started on Dialogflow CX?
SHANTANU MISRA: So Dialogflow CX is generally available now.
You can go online and try it out.
The simplest way to get access to it is via the Dialogflow web
page at cloud.google.com/dialogflow.
New CCAI customers can avail our new Dialogflow CX software.
Each new customer will receive a $600
credit for a free trial of Dialogflow CX.
MOLLY PALM: Well, thank you, Antony and Shantanu.
And don't miss the latest Dialogflow CX updates
on our Google Cloud blog.
And as Shantanu mentioned, be sure to check out
cloud.google.com/dialogflow for more information.
Thank you.
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Thank you, Molly.
Thank you, Shantanu.
SHANTANU MISRA: Thank you.
ANTONY PASSEMARD: Bye.