Five9 IVA Development Becomes More Powerful and More Collaborative

Through collaborative intelligence, contact center employees and AI actively enhance each other’s complementary strengths. AI delivers speed and scale, while your agents bring empathy and judgement. The result is better customer service and lower service costs. 

One way that AI helps your agents become more productive is through the use of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to automate routine tasks which in turn, allows your agents to focus on more complicated and often more rewarding work. And as Contact Center AI matures, virtual agents take on increasingly complicated tasks.  

To fully leverage the power of IVAs, you need tools to help you build and maintain your digital workforce of virtual agents. At Five9, we have spent years focused on making development easier for non-technical “citizen developers” but as demand for more advanced applications increases, we are also adding a new suite of tools for power developers. The result is a more powerful and more collaborative Five9 IVA studio. Read on to learn more about our newest enhancements to Five9 IVA Studio. 

Developer Collaboration  

Building more advanced applications means that multiple developers often need to work together on IVA Studio tasks. Developers can now see which studio users are viewing the same canvas while editing a task. This enables them to avoid editing within a canvas that is being used by another developer. They can also see a record of the last ten edits made to a task as well as which user made the edits. They can even click through to the specific node to understand what changes were made. 

More powerful programming tools  

To build better self-service experiences your developers need more advanced programming tools. We have added a vast array of new development features to IVA Studio. 

Multi-Modal Development 

As they say, “a picture is often worth a thousand words." We have added a visual form node which allows you to push a form to a caller’s mobile device during a voice interaction. This enables the caller to view and speak their selections from a list of options reducing the amount of effort necessary to solve their problem.  

Rich Media Controls 

IVA Studio provides support for digital interactions through the new Five9 Web Messager. This enables IVAs to display as set of input options as buttons. It also allows them to send and receive rich media content like images and documents.  

Reusable Components 

We have added the ability for developers to build reusable micro component that can be used by multiple developers across multiple applications. For example, developers might want to reuse a component that authenticates callers using voice biometrics. With our link task node, the application can route the call flow to a task that authenticates the caller and have it return once completed. This saves developers valuable time and reduces the time required to deploy new applications. 

JavaScript 

Our Expression Builder now supports JavaScript, allowing developers to manipulate data using JavaScript functions. This enables developers to parse, extract and analyze input from users. Often a single line of JavaScript can sort, and process data passed from back-end systems.    

Workflow Automation 

Five9 IVA Studio now offers a new node that enables IVAs to initiate workflows using Five9 Workflow Automation. This allows your IVAs to automate back-office tasks that integrate dozens of popular business applications. 

100% API driven 

All Studio operations can now be managed through APIs. This gives your developers the ability to integrate with back-office systems and automate operations. Anything you can do in IVA Studio can now be managed through APIs. 

Support for more Conversational AI engines 

Through Five9 IVA Studio, we give you access to a wide variety of conversational AI engines. To extend your development options we have now added IBM Watson Assistant in addition to Google Dialogflow and Amazon Lex as an option for building natural language applications.  

We have also extended our partnership with LumenVox to provide support for open speech transcription in addition to our existing support for LumenVox text-to-speech and LumenVox closed grammar speech recognition which is integrated into IVA studio for simple speech recognition options including: 

• Yes/No 

• Digit String 

• Integer 

• Custom Digit String 

• Scale 

• Alpha Numeric 

• Credit Card Number 

• Credit Card Expiration 

• Credit Card CVC 

Dialogflow Knowledgebases 

One of the most popular use cases for IVAs is to allow callers to ask questions. To make building frequently asked question (FAQ) applications easier we now provide support for Google’s Dialogflow Knowledge Connectors.  This enables you to automatically create FAQ style speech applications by simply pointing your Dialogflow agent to a web page with a list of questions and answers, reducing the time and effort to build FAQ applications. 

New Virtual Voiceover Avatars 

Five9 Virtual Voiceover significantly reduces the time and expense of producing high-quality custom voiceovers for static self-service scripts used with Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). This eliminates the need to hire and schedule time for human voice actors to create prompts. To extend your set of options we have now added new custom voice avatars in Spanish, German, and Portuguese along with support for WellSaid Labs’ new pre-packaged English accents for British, Scottish, Canadian, Australian and Southern United States. 

Learn more about Five9 IVA Studio!

Thanks to the team 

I’d also like to thank the entire AI, Automation and engineering team for their hard work and dedication that has led to the introduction of so many innovations.