Google today launched Agent Assist for Chat in public preview, an extension of its Contact Center AI platform that provides call center agents with support via text, in addition to calls. First announced in September, Agent Assist attempts to identify customers' intents and provide agents with real-time recommendations such as articles and FAQs as well as responses to messages. Online chat is becoming one of the most popular ways to reach out to businesses for customer support. In 2020, although phone and voice was responsible for the bulk of interactions, email makes up for around 13% of customer interactions, IDC reports. Live chat without automation is responsible for around 8% of interactions.

In this paper, we present Agent Assist, a virtual assistant which helps IT support staff to resolve tickets faster. It is essentially a conversation system which provides procedural and often complex answers to queries. This system can ingest knowledge from various sources like application documentation, ticket management systems and knowledge transfer video recordings. It uses an ensemble of techniques like question classification, knowledge graph based disambiguation, information retrieval, etc., to provide quick and relevant solutions to problems from various technical domains and is currently being used in more than 650 projects within IBM.