The payoffs can be immediate with small starter projects. Provide intelligent services to your contact center agents, allowing them to better serve their customers. Envision a virtual agent assistant that helps the agent complete tasks faster, more accurately, and with better customer service.  This Bot can act in the background on behalf of a human agent, translating and transcribing speech to text, then automatically fetching related knowledge.

IVRs, as they are in use today, are detrimental to customer satisfaction. Bots can provide direct personal customer care before a customer reaches an agent. In many cases, this can solve an issue without need of an expensive human contact center agent. Further, create and train your own cognitive IVR that will understand the topics your customers speak about and the issues your clients need to resolve. Automatically identify the language of the caller. Apply translations to over 30 languages. Fast track by first launching your Bot on Skype; the Bot framework is already integrated. Need to test drive a Bot concept? You can publish it to Microsoft’s Bot Directory for crowd-sourced testing.

For example, you can access the Microsoft Support Bot here. “Get Started” will connect you with the virtual agent that will first try to resolve your issue.

For cognitive and data scientists, Microsoft provides the Computational Network Toolkit. The open source CNTK is designed to be flexible and easy to configure but it still outperforms other open source environments. Computation graphs are created from a high-level description language and most training parameters are easily configurable. CNTK is what Microsoft’s own engineers use in developing deep learning applications.

The Cognitive Services Era

The world is about to change. With Democratizing AI, Microsoft plans to infuse every application that people interact with, on any device, at any point in time, with intelligence. These same intelligent capabilities that are infused in our own apps — the cognitive capabilities — will be available to every application developer in the world. To speed this along, we’ve just consolidated our AI teams, over 5000 researchers and engineers with the creation of the Microsoft AI and Research Group.