Avaya Inc poised to unveil ‘Slate’ chatter robot

NEW DELHI: Call centre technology provider Avaya Inc is close to unveiling an advanced chatter robot or chatbot, codenamed Slate, with the launch expected by the end of this year.

Silicon Valley giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are already eyeing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot, which can act as a virtual agent to serve organizations in real time scenarios.

Avaya’s Slate will able to integrate with any existing social platform, in any language, to offer an intelligent conversation with customers, a person familiar with the matter told ET.

It is learnt that the technology provider will strategically make chatbots as standard modules within its contact solutions centre starting 2017 and is likely to use AI platform proposition to win new deals worldwide, including in India, China and West Asia.

Based on ‘consultative discovery exercise’, the communications technology company is also keen to implement new AI technology across existing customer services hubs, including Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications (RCom) operations.

The US-based multinational is initiating early-stage trials by October with the availability by the end of the current year, said the person cited above.

Slate’s key functionality will be its ability to integrate with any front-end messaging service such as Facebook messenger or Google hangout, and it could be customized for customer interaction in regional languages.

Avaya is headed by Kevin J Kennedy, who was appointed to the US president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010.

The company will be positioning Slate as a value addition that could be able to generate better revenue for companies and reduce churn and increase agents’ motivation in a BPO environment.

Chabots will essentially take away menial tasks from agents and enable call centres to deliver faster and efficient service-level agreements. They will act as the first point of contact with customers to contextually answer queries with text chats. The chat session will be automatically transferred to online call centre agents if it is not able to resolve the customer query.