By Agam Shah
Amazon.com Inc. on Tuesday introduced two
artificial-intelligence services designed to help companies gain
better insight from business data spread across multiple sources,
from documents to conversations with customers.
Both services, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect and Amazon
Kendra, can be previewed immediately on the company's cloud
service, Amazon Web Services.
The tools, announced at Amazon's annual cloud event in Las
Vegas, aim to help the company's cloud customers incorporate
functionality such as natural language processing, but without long
waits often associated with AI-related projects. Amazon says it is
making this possible by integrating machine learning into the two
new stand-alone services.
"There's no machine-learning expertise required for either of
these services. They're just plug and play. You don't have to get
into all the weeds and get the training data and label the data and
all those sorts of things," said Matt Wood, vice president for
artificial intelligence services at Amazon Web Services.
The new AI tools process a client company's data and attach
meaning to that information through methods that identify patterns,
Amazon said.
Implementing AI isn't easy for companies. International Data
Corp. in a July study said that most of the 2,473 global
organizations surveyed had some failures in AI projects, and a
quarter had up to a 50% failure rate.
Enterprises are struggling with AI partly due to lack of skilled
personnel, said Patrick Moorhead, founder of technology research
firm Moor Insights & Strategy.
"Services like Contact Lens and Kendra enable enterprises
without machine-learning experts or data scientists to do AI for
contact centers and enterprise search," Mr. Moorhead said.
Amazon Kendra, an AI-enabled enterprise search tool, answers
queries by combing through a variety of data sources within an
organization. The search tool can be implemented on websites and
interfaces such as chatbots.
Kendra uses deep learning models to understand text from
multiple sources and across a number of domains including life
sciences and legal and financial services. Mr. Wood said.
"As people use this service more, the machine-learning models
under the hood get better at ranking and providing relevant answers
to the questions," Mr. Wood said.
For example, an employee at a client company might ask, "When
will an IT help desk open?" and Kendra will respond with an opening
time and a map to the help desk.
Kendra will be important to knowledge workers who spend a lot of
time searching for information, said Craig Le Clair, vice president
and principal analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester
Research Inc.
"Conversational intelligence will allow a wide range of human
queries. This type of capability is the next-generation knowledge
management system," Mr. Le Clair said.
Workgrid Software LLC, a unit of Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.
that specializes in workplace chatbots, has been testing Kendra to
see how technology could help its virtual assistants give better
answers to questions posed by employees of its client companies.
Kendra does the heavy lifting of providing the needed AI tools and
connecting data sources, said Gillian McCann, head of cloud
engineering and artificial intelligence at Workgrid Software.
"That's the piece I'm really trying to explore with Kendra...to
give me this further, more in-depth search. Rather than us building
it, we could use an AWS service," Ms. McCann said.
Contact Lens was built for Amazon's cloud-based call-center
service, Amazon Connect, which lets clients build a virtual contact
center. The new tool uses machine learning to assess customer
conversations. Amazon Connect customers can sign up for preview
access of the new tool.
Contact Lens uses machine learning to assess the sentiment of a
call, which could be positive or negative.
"We also detect long periods of silence and also clashes -- when
the agent and customer are talking over each other," Mr. Wood
said.
Using Contact Lens, companies can search transcripts of
customers' conversations with agents by keywords, sentiment and
other topics. Through dashboards and reports, they will be able to
measure trends such as call quality over a certain period. Based on
that, companies can implement changes, such as revising scripts or
training employees.
"You're getting better visibility; it's bringing into focus the
interactions that your customers are having with your organization,
day by day, minute by minute, and allowing you to inspect that on a
level that just wasn't possible before," Mr. Wood said.
Research and advisory company Gartner Inc. projects that 40% of
the contact center interactions will be fully automated by 2023, up
from around 25% in 2018.
Write to Agam Shah at agam.shah@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 03, 2019 15:48 ET (20:48 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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