Everyone is racing to give AI agents a voice. On the same day Zendesk announced voice capabilities for its AI agents, Sierra revealed it is also adding voice to its customer service bots.
“People are highly sensitive to the subtleties of a voice and the flow of a conversation,” Sierra’s co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor write in a blog post. “In bringing the benefits of conversational AI to phone calls, we started with the feel of the conversation itself. What’s the right tone and cadence? How should an agent handle being interrupted? Should it laugh? How fast and responsive can we make it? We obsessed over all of these details, ensuring that your AI agent responds quickly and naturally.”
This is the latest evolution of the conversational AI chatbot platform Taylor and Bavor launched in February. It would debut a system to help enterprise companies take advantage of AI agents powered by what it calls AgentOS. The company claims its work has received a customer satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of five or higher, “on par or in cases exceeding the ratings in their contact centers.”
Companies provide these voice-powered agents with the necessary service-specific context so that they can speak like human employees. They can understand your brand, product names, and even technical jargon and buzzwords. Sierra claims its agents can even note email addresses, order numbers, mailing addresses and other information required to process service tickets. Like other agent providers, it can also be personalized to make a note of anniversaries, birthdays or other special occasions.
Sierra also boasts that its agents recognize sentiment and tone shifts, so it hopefully will know that if you yell at it, you’re getting frustrated rather than excited.
There’s also a mechanism in place to route calls easily from the AI agent to the human agent, and it includes a detailed summary during the hand-off so customers don’t have to waste time repeating themselves to the human agent.
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