Microsoft has unveiled a new multilingual voice agent feature for its Dynamics 365 Contact Center, marking a significant advancement in AI automation for customer support services. This new functionality allows businesses to customise voice agents through Copilot Studio, supporting a total of 26 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Turkish.
Traditionally, multilingual support solutions in contact centres have required separate bots for each language. However, Microsoft’s innovative approach enables a single voice agent to manage multiple languages simultaneously, facilitating seamless customer interactions. Additionally, the voice agent has been designed to switch languages mid-call based on customer input, such as when a caller selects a language from a menu.
Businesses can further enhance multilingual support by assigning dedicated phone numbers for each language, enabling the same voice agent to initiate conversations based on the number dialed by the customer. If the voice agent encounters a query it cannot address, or if a customer seeks human assistance, administrators have the ability to establish routing rules that escalate the call to a live agent who speaks the conversation's language.
Hemang Shah, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, expressed enthusiasm regarding the introduction of the multilingual capabilities. “We are excited to announce support for multilingual voice agents authored with Copilot Studio for the Dynamics 365 Contact Center voice channel,” he stated in a blog post. “This new feature expands Copilot Studio’s capabilities from messaging to voice interactions, enabling businesses to handle calls in multiple languages using a single bot.”
The implementation of this new feature promises several advantages. It is expected to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by streamlining maintenance through a single agent system, which minimises the complexities and operational overhead typically associated with managing multiple language-specific bots. Additionally, deployment is characterised by increased speed and efficiency, as updates and new features are applied concurrently across all supported languages, ensuring that improvements are rapidly accessible.
Moreover, Microsoft anticipates that the voice agent’s ability to switch languages during calls will enhance Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, providing a more personal and fluent interaction experience for multilingual customers.
The Dynamics 365 Contact Center voice agent complements other autonomous agents available in Microsoft’s Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform. These include an Intent Agent, which observes agent interactions to resolve queries, and a Knowledge Agent which utilises this data to generate new knowledge content aimed at enhancing customer-facing voice agents.
Microsoft's recent developments in AI automation extend beyond the Dynamics 365 Contact Center. The company has introduced a Queues App for Teams, which allows organisations to manage both inbound and outbound calls directly within Microsoft Teams. Notably, this aligns with a growing trend within enterprise software that focuses on agentic AI technology, as Microsoft recently launched a public preview of its revamped Copilot Studio, envisioned to act as a central hub for autonomous AI agents.
In a collaborative effort, Microsoft and SAP are also proceeding with plans to integrate their virtual assistants, 365 Copilot and Joule, a move first hinted at during SAP’s Sapphire event in June and showcased at Microsoft Ignite 2024. This integration provides customers with the flexibility to select either assistant as their primary tool within Microsoft-SAP environments, thereby merging their functionalities.
Overall, Microsoft’s new multilingual voice agent and its related advancements in AI automation reflect a notable shift in business practices, particularly in how customer support can be delivered effectively across diverse language requirements.
Source: Noah Wire Services