No Jitter Roll: ASAPP Brings Generative AI to IVRs, AWS Expands Amazon Bedrock, and ServiceNow Adds New Gen-AI-powered Tools.

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week NJR highlights another round of generative AI-related news from ASAPP's launch of GenerativeAgent which provides interactive voice response (IVR) functionality, AWS's Amazon Bedrock now includes new and updated foundation models and a low-code/no-code tool called Agents for Amazon Bedrock, and ServiceNow has added case summarization and text-to-code to its Gen AI-powered toolkit.

ASAPP Launches GenerativeAgent for IVR

The AI cloud application provider for contact centers launched GenerativeAgent which provides a generative AI-powered IVR customer experience (CX). GenerativeAgent can integrate with existing backend systems to automate interactions and relevant API calls as needed during customer interactions. GenerativeAgent can be plugged into existing IVRs as an escalation path between the current IVR flows and agents, or it can handle the full end-to-end IVR.

“For decades, companies have had to manually create and manage complex logic trees to attempt to automate dialogues,” said Gustavo Sapoznik, Founder and CEO of ASAPP, “GenerativeAgent removes all of [that] conversation design effort.”

AWS Expands Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Web Services has expanded its fully managed foundation model (FM) service Amazon Bedrock to include Claude 2 from Anthropic and Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 from Stability AI and Cohere as a new FM provider.

Cohere’s main text generation model, Command, is trained to follow user commands and provide functionality such as summarization, copywriting, dialogue, extraction, and question answering. Cohere’s text understanding model, Embed, can be used for search, clustering, or classification tasks across 100+ languages.

Claude 2 is the latest version of Anthropic’s language model Claude 2 can take up to 100,000 tokens in each conversational task prompt (which means the prompt instructing the model to generate something can be very long). Claude 2 can also write longer documents such as memos and stories.

Stability AI is a community-driven, open AI company, offering multiple FMs that create text, images, audio, video, code, and more from text instructions. Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 can produce improved image and composition detail over its predecessor for such media as films, television, music, and instructional videos.

Amazon itself introduced its own new capability called Agents for Amazon Bedrock. Agents for Amazon Bedrock automates the process of manually writing code for the FM to interact with an enterprise’s systems (which it must do to perform tasks).

• AWS and Twilio are jointly implementing predictive AI technology by bringing together Amazon SageMaker and Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform. This will give users access to new machine learning powered tools.

Want to know more?

AWS launched Bedrock back in April 2023 as discussed in this in-depth article. Also check out this article about Zoom and its ties to Anthropic.

ServiceNow Expands Generative AI Capabilities

The digital workflow company has announced two new Gen AI capabilities that will become available in September 2023:

1. Case summarization: Uses generative AI to read and distill case information across IT, HR, and customer service cases, including customer or incident details, previous touchpoints, actions taken by involved parties, and the eventual resolution, to create case summary notes.
2. Text-to-code: developers can write plain, natural language text descriptions of the type of code they want, and generative AI within the Now Platform will convert the text into code suggestions and, in some cases, complete code which can be reviewed by humans before implementation.

Both case summarization and text-to-code are powered by ServiceNow proprietary LLMs, developed to comprehend the Now Platform, workflows, automation use cases, processes, and more.

• ServiceNow, NVIDIA and Accenture announced the launch of AI Lighthouse, a program designed to help enterprises develop and deploy generative AI capabilities. AI Lighthouse uses the ServiceNow enterprise automation platform and engine, NVIDIA AI supercomputing and software, and Accenture AI transformation services.

Want to know more?

ServiceNow has announced multiple other Gen AI-based products over the last several months. For example, Generative AI Controller allows organizations to connect ServiceNow instances to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and OpenAI API LLMs; Now Assist for Search provides natural language responses based on a customer's own knowledge base; and Now Assist for Virtual Agent, which is a virtual agent designed to provide conversational self-service experiences.

This Week on No Jitter

In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories for the week:

• How Microsoft Copilot Could Help End Users Fly Through Tasks: Microsoft Copilot's pricing structure made news – but what do users get for that $30 every month? We break down how Copilot works, what it can do, and how safe user data is within Copilot.
• The Real Optical Network Revolution Still Hasn't Happened Yet: There's still a lot of room for improvements in cost reduction and network traffic management. Optical routing could be one way to address those shortfalls.
• Experience Index: A New Way to Measure CX Journeys: Genesys’ new methodology is designed to go beyond measuring customer sentiment to identifying strategies for better outcomes.