AWS Connect Services

The technology behind AWS Connect is astounding because it combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, large training data sets, insights from other call center operations, and integrates Connect seamlessly with the rest of the platform.

So your ability to do really amazing things in voice and in text, went from, ‘It’s an oddball thing’ to ‘Everybody can do it if they’re on the platform.’ It’s an AWS service component that is telephony-centric.

Pretend you’re an airline. You call in and they can look up your flight, they can change your flight over the phone with a robot—all of that systems integration is really hard to do. AWS has made it another pluggable component in the AWS ecosystem. So if you’re building on their platform, and then one day you decide that you want to have voice interconnect with that, or SMS interconnect, or whatever—all of the primitives are already there to hook right into the framework. So instead of having to figure out how to glue your PDX to your legacy app, you just bolt on the service. Now your cloud app can interact with people and things out on the phone system and the networks.

For things like call centers, this is really amazing.

For example, it can do real-time analysis of the conversation between the call center worker and the customer. They can in real time, get a transcription of it, and even do sentiment analysis around: Was the customer happy? Were they sad? Were they angry? Were they yelling at the call center agent? Did they hang up in frustration? You can infer a lot about how that conversation went, even if you don’t read every word of the transcription, because there are indicators in the way we speak and the words we use that signal emotion.

So this is next level, because most call centers, at best, they just record these things and once in a while a supervisor listens to a recording at random. This is next level. This is real time data about how you’re doing, how your customers are feeling, etc.