Voice is still the primary channel of engagement in customer service, shows the Genesys “State of customer experience” report — with a nearly 20% usage gap between voice and email (the second most-used channel) in North America. And 80% of respondents in the Middle East/Africa report using voice.

Voice is a foundational feature in smart cars, smart TVs, smart appliances and digital assistants like Siri. As consumers, we’ve become accustomed to using our voice for everything — from ordering our groceries, to finding the address of a new restaurant, to playing our favorite song.

But how we use our voice to get help has changed. Advances in technology mean we can use our voice to engage with brands through various devices and applications. What’s become critical now is what happens during and after those engagements.

Knowing Who You’re Talking To

As voice conversations move online, it becomes difficult to tell who that voice belongs to. Is this the voice of the person that’s authorized to open this account? Use of technology and availability of digital data has opened up more opportunities for fraud and identity theft. Identity fraud incidents increased by about 45% in 2020; in 2021 incidents of fraud cost Americans $56 billion in losses, with $43 billion attributed to identity fraud scams.

New Data, New Opportunities

The actual Voice of the Customer — when streamed and captured — is part of the data fabric. That data includes insights into customer intent, identity, behaviors and satisfaction. It not only includes the words customers speak but also the pauses, sighs and laughs. The ability to fully take advantage of that data remains elusive but advances in voice biometric authentication, speech analytics and sentiment analysis can help bridge some of those gaps.

Smart Automation Reduces Frustration, Improves Efficiency

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled automation is the Holy Grail of efficiency. Rather than creating rigid rules, AI can identify patterns and relationships that can be used to automate a variety of processes. Being able to understand actual conversational is critical to creating automatic conversations through bots. When bots are trained in actual conversations, they can understand better and respond more naturally. This is especially true for a global customer base, where you need to account for languages and regional differences in speech patterns.

Integration Lets You Tap into Voice in Real Time

The recent release of Genesys AudioHook Monitor gives organizations access to conversations in real time so they can create AI-enabled innovations that span a variety of use cases, such as biometrics and voice analytics. AudioHook Monitor streams voice from the Genesys Cloud™ platform to any third party, making that voice available for any number of applications.

Here’s a look at how some Genesys AppFoundry® partners are building new applications using AudioHook Monitor.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions adds AI capabilities to your contact center of choice to enhance the customer experience, improve agent productivity and gain conversation insights. AWS CCI solutions use a combination of AWS AI and machine learning-powered services, such as Amazon Transcribe, for real-time transcription, sensitive data redaction and more. Customers can get started quickly and easily with AWS Live Call Analytics sample solution, which now features out-of-box integration with the Genesys AudioHook Monitor.

“We are excited to announce Amazon Transcribe’s integration with Genesys AudioHook. Now Genesys Cloud customers can utilize Amazon Transcribe to deliver highly accurate call transcripts in real-time and gain insights such as customer sentiment and call issues,” said Priyank Goyal, Principal Product Manager, Amazon Transcribe, AWS. “This integration accelerates the delivery of supervisor alerts and real-time recommendations to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction rates.”

Nuance Communications (a Microsoft company)

Nuance Gatekeeper is a cloud-native biometric security solution that enables frictionless, fast and accurate authentication for legitimate persons while detecting and preventing fraudsters — wherever and however — they engage.

“The AudioHook interface eases access to live call audio in Genesys Cloud, enabling a number of Nuance Contact Center AI solutions, notably Gatekeeper,” said Brett Beranek, VP and GM, Nuance Security and Biometrics. “AudioHook provides a concise and simple API that covers essential components for audio acquisition in a distributed environment. The sample code is very useful for demonstrating how an AudioHook server should interact with the AudioHook client.”

Omilia

Omilia is expanding its OCP miniApps Premium App to enable Genesys customers to add voice biometrics to any Genesys Cloud instance. The Streaming API enables customers to deploy Voice Biometrics in a matter of hours, in any Genesys Cloud instance, without any major changes to the call center’s processes. OCP learns callers’ voices and seamlessly validates them before the caller ever reaches the agent. This reduces average handle time by at least 40 seconds.

The voice biometrics technology has already been proven in real-world deployments for companies handling hundreds of millions of calls per year, according to Omilia. This unique approach and technology delivers accurate decisions — with a high level of confidence — in as little as 2 seconds.

“With AudioHook Monitor, Omilia can deliver immediate value to Genesys customers through its audio analysis and transcription capabilities. The one-click ordering of AppFoundry, combined with API-scripted deployment and real-time streaming, Genesys customers can deploy Omilia voice biometric solution quickly and without high upfront costs,” said Spiros Methenitis, Director of Product Management at Omilia.

SuccessKPI

SuccessKPI is launching Agent Empower in addition to its robust SuccessKPI Power Package to provide AI-powered real-time coaching and guidance to agents based on conversational insights and sentiment analysis. Genesys customers can activate SuccessKPI within minutes to automate time-consuming tasks including call summarization, disposition coding, and case creation. The platform reduces agent workload by 25 percent, giving them more time and bandwidth to focus on the customer. The solution is seamlessly integrated with SuccessKPI’s patented Playbook, allowing companies to create action-based business rules to alert agents and supervisors, redact sensitive data, store key details in CRM, and create trigger-specific workflows.

“AudioHook from Genesys transforms the customer experience landscape,” said Dave Rennyson, Chief Executive Officer of SuccessKPI. “When integrated with SuccessKPI, Genesys customers receive real-time insights into customer conversations, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. Businesses everywhere can now serve and delight customers more quickly.”

Uniphore

The Uniphore U-Assist suite includes U-Assist Aftercall, an agent after-call work summary and call disposition automation solution; and U-Assist In-Call, a product that enables “super agents” using real-time, step-by-step in call guidance, customer intent and emotion detection, as well as automation of repetitive tasks. U-Assist product suite leverages conversational AI, workflow automation, robotic process automation and a user-friendly UX to deliver a measurable impact to customer support operations. Results include up to 30% reduction in average handle time, 50% drop in agent on-boarding time and 80% reduction in error rate.

“Through the AudioHook integration, Uniphore can now deliver its world-class conversational automation solutions to Genesys customers,” said Ana Kostioukova, Senior Director of Products and Partnerships at Uniphore. “This is an exciting expansion of the existing partnership with Genesys as our agent-assist products are now available to … Genesys Cloud customers.”

ValidSoft

For businesses that digitally interact with customers to fuel business success, ValidSoft delivers a privacy-certified, frictionless, precise voice biometric authentication and identity assurance solution that can help businesses reduce authentication costs up to 40%, provide a better user experience whilst also tackling fraud losses and identity theft. ValidSoft enables “Trusted Humans” to interact to prevent fraud and identity theft and to deliver a strong customer experience with higher ROI.

“We’re delighted to bring ValidSoft voice authentication technology to Genesys customers who can deliver superior customer experiences using a voice-based identity assurance and authentication solution,” said Brendan McCarthy, VP Channel Strategy, ValidSoft. “Businesses can expect to reduce fraud and ID theft, call handling time, increase ROI, with no reliance on passwords, PINs, or knowledge-based authentication.”

As AI matures, it opens new opportunities to innovate. Voice interactions are a staple in customer service interactions. And those customer service conversations contain rich insights that are rarely used to their full potential. Unlocking the value in these conversations creates a new source of differentiation – you can use this data to better understand your customers and employees, to protect your business, and to improve your service. These partner solutions represent just a few of the possibilities AudioHook Monitor is unlocking for new, AI-based voice applications.