11 Features That Make Cognigy.AI the Best Voice Platform for Contact Centers

Building a voice bot is distinctly different from building a chat counterpart. Speech processing accuracy, an on-brand voice personality, and the need to compensate for missing visual aids and historical references are just a few of the numerous factors a voice UX designer needs to consider.

And while many might choose to get away with a chat-focused conversational solution, a voice native platform might well be what it takes to go from mediocre voice services to exhilarating, memorable call experiences.

That is why at Cognigy, voice is our first-class citizen. We are proud to help you not only build and deploy state-of-the-art virtual agents on phone but also have fun doing it. Not convinced yet? Read on to explore the 11 compelling features that make Cognigy.AI your go-to voice platform for customer service automation.

1. Click-and-Call Softphone to Expedite Bot QA

Frequent and ongoing testing is inherent to a healthy and reliable virtual staff. A common way to test-drive the overall user experience is to dial in using an external mobile device. With Live Follow, Cognigy.AI retrieves the entire conversation in the Flow Editor in real time as it progresses, helping you instantly spot frictions for debugging.

But it gets even better. Our built-in softphone enables you to place a call directly from the Cognigy.AI Interaction Panel with a single click, easing bot maintenance and QA processes by orders of magnitude. It uses the same telephony system that the end customers would and replicates 100% real-world bot behavior.

2. Voice Preview for Content and Real-Time Parameter Settings

With customer needs and business offerings changing all the time, fast delivery and constant improvement are critical to ensure your voice service is always up to the minute. Cognigy.AI allows you to not only modify STT, TTS, and other call-related settings at any part of the conversation flow easily but also preview your audio experiences on the fly – with zero latency. Our unique Voice Preview capability enables highly granular inspection of your speech flow – down to individual responses, making bot development extremely efficient and agile.

3. Fully Integrated STT Services and Custom Model Support

Speech recognition determines your virtual agent’s ability to accurately process customer input and ultimately defines service quality. Cognigy.AI provides deep integration with market-leading speech service vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google Cloud) while still giving you the freedom to adopt any third-party STT / TTS service of choice. Better yet, you can build custom-trained speech models for your target use cases and dynamically switch models depending on the speech context to maximize recognition precision.

4. Low-code SSML Editor to Enrich Speech Synthesis

Nobody likes dull and robotic voice responses. All the more reason why a voice personality that resonates with your brand experiences needs to be baked into your bot design. Cognigy.AI comes with an SSML editor that lets you perfect your output speech through fine-grained control of various voice elements like emphasis, pause, pitch, and more. The best part? Our built-in markup templates make the editor highly accessible for non-technical business users while giving voice UX developers a head start.

5. Integrated Agent Handover with Smart Escalation Handling

The importance of an error handling and escalation strategy cannot be emphasized enough, particularly on voice channels where visual guidance is often missing. To intuitively handle wrong turns and avoid conversation dead-ends, Cognigy.AI provides various escalation procedures – ranging from simple actions like rephrasing the message or skipping the question up to advanced measures like executing an alternative flow or transferring the call to an agent.

6. Embedded Cognitive Services beyond NLU

Cognigy.AI allows all audio streams to be processed directly with our market-proven NLU engine and easily managed via the low-code UI. In addition to a powerful intent trainer for high recognition accuracy, Cognigy NLU enables progressive learning from past interactions so your bot can give personalized responses, naturally manage disambiguation, and handle sophisticated, dynamic dialogues.

On top of that, you can craft a richer service experience leveraging our native sentiment analysis and any other cognitive voice solution like biometric authentication.

7. Real-time Machine Translation and Language Detection

If localizing voice services is part of your customer access strategy, good news – Cognigy.AI is built from the ground up to make the creation and deployment of multilingual phone bots extremely simple. There are multiple approaches to achieving this. You can pre-translate and localize your content and intent models within a few clicks. Or the voice agent can intuitively transition to and converse in the same language customers speak using advanced automatic language detection and real-time translation.

8. Enterprise Voice Features: From Call Recording and Agent Assist to Outbound Calling

In contact centers, a voice agent can go above and beyond handling inbound queries. It can record calls as part of compliance and quality management requirements, listen in on live support to provide real-time agent assistance, or proactively reach out to customers for follow-up and feedback collection. These functionalities are available out-of-the-box in Cognigy.AI, letting you build highly adaptable, multifunctional voice bots from day one.

9. Improved Voice UX with Continuous ASR

In general, speech services identify the end of customers’ utterances based on the duration of the audio silence. Yet, a common pitfall is that such detection happens too swiftly that the user is cut off while speaking, especially in long, complex responses. This results in missing input for processing, but more importantly, it disrupts a seamless conversation and the user experience. Continuous automated speech recognition with Cognigy Voice Gateway lets you flexibly manage silence detection and incremental dialogues to ensure a fluid voice interaction.

10. Plug-and-Play Contact Center Connectivity

Cognigy.AI supports integration into virtually any voice infrastructure, be it CCaaS, CPaaS, on-premises contact centers, or PSTN and PBX telephony networks – through prebuilt connectors or generic SIP and WebRTC interfaces. This agility allows you to tackle the complete spectrum of voice use cases, from conversational IVR, self-service, and outbound calling to agent assist and real-time translation on voice. Plus, it saves you integration hassle to focus on customer experiences and shorten time-to-market.

11. Natively Integrated Voice Gateway

Last but not least, native voice connectivity in Cognigy.AI means that you have full control over speech interactions through not only text and SSML messages but also SIP commands from the Flow Editor – to deliver unlimited service use cases. Likewise, you can collect recordings and meaningful speech analytics to enable deeper integration into back-office operations. This makes Cognigy.AI your one-stop-shop solution for contact center voice automation.

To learn more about Cognigy.AI’s voice capabilities, visit our documentation.

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