watsonx Assistant

In today's fast-paced customer service landscape, delivering timely, accurate, and personalized support to customers is no longer a goal – it's a necessity. For years, organizations have relied on virtual assistants and chatbots to deliver self-service support powered by traditional AI capabilities that can reason through simple and complex customer queries. But building and maintaining these sophisticated conversational AI journeys can be an incredibly complex task. Now with the rise of Generative AI, there is a new horizon promising to elevate customer experiences with powerful AI chat and voice assistants at a fraction of time. 

At IBM we are thrilled to introduce a set of new trustworthy generative AI features available in watsonx Assistant and designed to elevate customer experiences, enable personalized interactions, streamline the build-experience, and deliver contextually relevant responses to increase efficiency and improve customer satisfaction at scale. 

Conversational Search now available in Plus and Enterprise Plans 

Last year IBM announced the beta release of Conversational Search, a new generative AI capability that brings IBM Large Language Models and Conversational AI to deliver policy-grounded answers to customers with little to no training needed. Today, we are excited to make this new capability generally available to Plus and Enterprise users of watsonx Assistant, now enhanced with latest IBM Granite models purpose-built for business use.  

The IBM watsonx Assistant Conversational Search functionality offers a transformative approach to virtual assistance, enabling teams to build and deploy conversational experiences powered by generative AI with reduced manual effort. Combined with the semantic search capabilities of watsonx Discovery, Conversational Search orchestrates a dual-stage process, seamlessly retrieving relevant content from business documentation before synthesizing contextual responses using IBM Granite large language models. Such integration not only offers responses grounded on business content, but instills trust through traceable sources, thereby ensuring responsible AI usage and much richer user experiences. This functionality empowers users to accelerate the build-process while increasing the scope of topics company chat interfaces can cover, facilitating diverse and sometimes complex interactions with clients. 

IBM watsonx Assistant's Conversational Search is a game-changer for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape while ensuring trustworthy responses to customers and employees alike.   

Users can obtain access to Conversational Search right off their watsonx Assistant instance, with the ability to extend usage by purchasing the Conversational Search add-on. 

Introducing watsonx Large Speech Models now available out-of-the-box 

We have seen how generative AI is transforming chat-based virtual assistant platforms. But what about voice? Businesses are now adopting a new form of technology designed to enhance speech recognition for AI voice assistants, Large Speech Models or LSMs. An LSM is an advanced artificial intelligence system designed to understand, process, and generate human speech, often based on deep learning architectures and trained on vast amounts of speech data. 

Based on transformer technology, LSMs take vast amounts of training data and model parameters to deliver accuracy in speech recognition.  IBM Research and Development teams have been hard at work designing these new, state-of-the-art watsonx Large Speech Models (LSMs), purpose-built for enterprise use to support a variety of customer support use cases like self-service phone assistants and real-time call transcription. And today we are very excited to announce they are now generally available to watsonx Assistant for Voice customers.  

Now watsonx Assistant users with the Telephony/Voice add-on suscription can leverage these Large Speech Models in English right off of their instance to enhance speech recognition in phone channels.   

These Large Speech Models are our most competitive and accurate yet. Based on internal benchmarking released for the beta, this new LSM is already outperforming OpenAI’s Whisper model on short-form English use cases. In this feature beta release, launched November 2023, the out-of-the-box performance of our English LSM Word Error Rate (WER) was 42% lower than that of the Whisper model across 5 use cases for customer service and we expect to continue to drive success with improved performance over time. 

Take your call center AI assistants to the next level with these new generative AI features now available in watsonx Assistant. For more information about these new features, reach out to your IBM Representative and schedule a custom demo today. 

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