Announcing conversational AI partner solutions

We are excited to announce the availability of AWS conversational AI partner solutions, which enables enterprises to implement high-quality, highly effective chatbot, virtual assistant, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions through the domain expertise of AWS Partners and AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services.

The partners highlighted in this announcement include Cation Consulting, Deloitte, NLX, Quantiphi, ServisBOT, TensorIoT, and XAPP AI. These partners use Amazon Kendra, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly, as well as additional AWS AI/ML services, in their solutions.

Overview of conversational AI

The demand for conversational AI (CAI) interfaces continues to grow as users prefer to interact with businesses on digital channels. Organizations of all sizes are developing chatbots, voice assistants, and IVR solutions to increase user satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and streamline business processes. COVID-19 has further accelerated the adoption, due to social distancing rules and shelter-in-place orders.

Conversational AI interfaces, like chatbots, voice assistants, and IVR, are used broadly across a wide variety of industry segments and use cases. CAI solutions go beyond customer service to additional use cases across industries — for example, triaging medical symptoms, booking an appointment, transferring money, or signing up for a new account.

Building a high-quality, highly effective CAI interface can be challenging for some, given the free-form nature of communications—users can say or write whatever they like in many different ways. Implementing a CAI solution involves selecting use cases, defining Intents and sample utterances, designing conversational flows, integrating backend services, and testing, monitoring, and measuring in an iterative approach.

We are moving past the days of simple question and answer services. Chatbots have advanced beyond simple decision trees to incorporate sophisticated natural language understanding (NLU) that not only understands a user’s Intent, but enables the chatbot to respond appropriately in a way that satisfies the user. We are seeing further advancements in CAI to cover true multimodal experiences, wherein users can interact via voice and text simultaneously.

Fortunately, there is help on this journey. The seven AWS Partners for CAI listed in this post have expertise in launching highly effective chatbot and voice experiences, built on top of AWS AI/ML services.

AWS conversational AI partner solutions

With AWS conversational AI partner solutions, enterprises can use the expertise of AWS Partners, using AWS AI/ML services, to build high-quality, highly effective chatbot and voice experiences. This enables you to increase user satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and achieve business goals—all while speeding up the time to market.

The following highlights our initial AWS Partners for conversational AI.

Cation Consulting, the maker of the Parly.ai platform, use natural language conversational AI to build multilingual, multi-channel solutions. Cation enables high-value customer interactions, at a lower cost, through enterprise chatbots and live chat with AI-powered agent-assist capabilities. Cation Consulting helped Ryanair build a chatbot that improves its customer support experience, helping customers find answers to their questions quickly and easily. They recently helped 123.ie implement a highly advanced chatbot for onboarding new accounts that incorporates image recognition and document processing to speed up the process by analyzing a customer’s driver’s license and previous policy documentation.

Deloitte, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, is one of the leading service providers in the design, delivery, implementation, and scalability of high ROI conversational experiences across industries. Deloitte’s global CAI experts deliver solutions that are highly personalized, context-aware, and designed to serve users any time, any place, and on any device. Deloitte has implemented CAI solutions for Fortune 500 enterprises across the financial services, hospitality, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and utility spaces.

Conversations by NLX enables companies to transform customer contact into personalized customer self-service. The platform enables non-technical users to build and manage chat, voice, and multimodal conversational experiences, helping brands track and elevate customer self-service into a strategic asset. NLX customers include a global drink manufacturer, a leading international airline, and more.

Quantiphi uses in-house accelerators built on top of AWS AI/ML services to implement conversational AI solutions. Quantiphi utilizes its expertise in CAI to design and implement complex conversation flows, derive insights, and develop dashboards showcasing impactful key performance indicators. Quantiphi has implemented CAI solutions for a major healthcare provider, a national utilities firm, and more.

ServisBOT’s conversational AI platform enables businesses to build and manage self-service chatbots and voice assistants, faster and easier. ServisBOT provides tools for building and optimizing advanced solutions, including covering multi-bot environments, security, backend integrations, and analytics. The platform also offers low-code tooling, blueprints, and reusable components for business users. ServisBOT’s customers include a global financial services corporation, a global insurance firm, a government agency, and more.

TensorIoT delivers industry-leading conversational AI solutions, including Alexa apps, Amazon Lex chatbots, and voice applications on the edge and in the cloud. Whether users interact via phone, web, or SMS, TensorIoT has expertise developing end-to-end solutions. TensorIoT helped Citibot develop its CAI platform for government use cases. Additional customers include a global credit reporting company, a national music retailer, and more.

XAPP AI’s Optimal Conversation Studio empowers enterprises to create intelligent virtual assistants for voice and chat channels. OC Studio provides model, dialog and content management, regression testing, and human-in-the-loop workflows to enable continuous CAI transformation, and thereby a more efficient and effective conversational experience. XAPP AI’s Optimal Conversation Studio platform powers over 1,200 conversational AI solutions for over 100 customers across consumer packaged goods, automotive, insurance, media, retail, education, nonprofit, and government spaces.

Getting Started

Our AWS Partners for conversational AI help make AWS one of the best places for all your CAI workloads. Learn more about conversational AI use cases at AWS or explore our AWS conversational AI partners for more information. Contact your AWS account manager for additional information or questions, including how to become an AWS Partner.

About the Authors

Arte Merritt leads partnerships for Contact Center Intelligence and Conversational AI. He is a frequent author and speaker in the conversational AI space. He was the co-founder and CEO of the leading analytics platform for conversational interfaces, leading the company to 20,000 customers, 90B messages, and multiple acquisition offers. Previously he founded Motally, a mobile analytics platform he sold to Nokia. Arte has more than 20 years experience in big data analytics. Arte is an MIT alum.