Create a next-generation call center with Watson Assistant Phone Integration

Summary

Watson Assistant provides a way to integrate a set of orchestrated Watson services with a public or private telephone network by using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This code pattern walks you through an example that enables you to automate your call centers using Watson Assistant, Watson Speech to Text and Watson Text to Speech, without having to orchestrate between all of the different services yourself. The Watson Assistant Phone Integration feature does that for you.

Description

Watson Assistant enables direct voice interactions over a telephone with an artificial intelligence (AI) self-service agent. Watson Assistant helps you:

• Improve telephone-based customer service: Connect IBM Watson services to your telephone systems, allowing it to answer queries from callers, perform call triage, and transfer the call to the appropriate agents.
• Drive down costs: Reduce costs by using IBM Watson Assistant to handle some of your calls instead of using call center agents.

When you have completed this code pattern, you will understand how to:

• Provision Watson Assistant, Speech to Text and Text to Speech services on IBM Cloud
• Import a sample call center dialog to Watson Assistant
• Connect Watson Assistant to Twilio using the SIP communication protocol
• Improve speech recognition accuracy by creating a Watson Speech to Text custom language model with a grammar (optional)

Flow

1. User phones a call center phone number that is associated with a Twilio SIP Trunk.
2. The Twilio number connects to Watson Assistant on IBM Cloud through the SIP communication protocol.
3. Watson Assistant uses Watson Speech to Text to transcribe user input. Based on user input, certain flows in Watson Assistant will be triggered and, as required, the flow switches between a general purpose or customized Speech to Text model.
4. Text responses from Watson Assistant are synthesised into audio using Watson Text to Speech.
5. Watson Assistant sends the audio back by using the Twilio SIP Trunk.
6. The resulting audio is played back to the user.

Instructions

Find the detailed instructions in the README. These steps explain how to:

1. Create Watson services on IBM Cloud.
2. Configure Watson Assistant Phone Integration and Twilio.
3. Import the dialog skill into Watson Assistant.
4. Create a Speech to Text custom language model.