Amazon Connect vs. Google Cloud Contact Center AI
The biggest piece of news at Enterprise Connect 2017 was the Amazon Connect announcement by Amazon Web Services. So how might you compare Amazon Connect with Google Cloud's Contact Center AI? Perhaps the biggest difference is that Google isn't coming to market with something to compete with the existing contact center solution providers, as AWS has done. Quite to the contrary -- according to its contact center partners, Google began working with them months ago to help shape their solutions.
In my opinion, a more apt comparison is to Nuance with speech recognition. Years ago, as speech recognition was being brought into interactive voice response (IVR) systems to supplement or replace touch-tone signals, Nuance was often a key partner for the speech recognition technology. Even as recently as this May at its annual partner summit, Nuance recognized Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys (among others) with partner awards.
The Google model appears similar to the initial Nuance approach (note Nuance went on to create an IVR to compete with its partners). Google has AI expertise, including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing, but not contact center domain expertise. Instead of creating something that would compete with the established contact center players, it's hoping to build something that all of them would use, with the ultimate goal of bringing more workloads to the Google Cloud Platform.
