Five9 Furthers AI Focus with Inference Acquisition

The pandemic is driving customer service reimagined. Customers are embracing the opportunity to engage in an omnichannel fashion, and AI is playing a pivotal role in empowering contact centers with more efficient, more effective operations.

Five9 announced a definitive agreement to purchase Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) platform provider Inference Solutions.

“We believe adding Inference to the Five9 (News - Alert) portfolio accelerates our leadership position in AI while also providing customers with a market leading IVA at a time when customers need efficient real-time assistance,” explained Rowan Trollope, CEO, Five9.

In acquiring the Inference platform, Five9 is purchasing a platform with a robust, user-friendly drag-and-drop UI, making IVA management and configuration tasks browser-based, visual and not requiring code. In addition, the platform works with some of the leading AI and speech services, allowing contact centers the ability to choose preferred vendors and services – such as text-to-speech from Google (News - Alert) or NLP from Amazon.

Inference supports over 125 languages for speech recognition as well as nearly 200 text-to-speech voices spanning 30 languages. And, the solution comes with pre-packaged integrations and task to enable firms lacking in expertise to easily integrate with popular CRMs as well as a fully PCI (News - Alert) compliant catalogue of payment gateways.

“Intelligent and personalized self-service has become the preferred approach to service for customers,” said Donna Fluss, President, DMG Consulting, LLC. “IVAs, which are AI-enabled omni-channel self-service solutions, are going to play a major role in the future of customer service as they provide an outstanding service experience while automating activities that previously required the attention of live agents. The acquisition of Inference by Five9 gives them a leading IVA solution, greatly expanding their self-service offerings.”

Is AI in your contact center?

Edited by Maurice Nagle