How easily we interact with computers strongly informs how likely technology is to disrupt a given aspect of life or business. When we needed to punch code into a command line just to load a program, computers were far less user-friendly. But the mouse and graphical interfaces made things much easier, and computers blossomed from niche products into the mainstream. Touch took things further still, helping create a world where most people carry a computer in their pocket while increasingly also wearing one on their wrist. What's the next frontier that will further evolve human-computer relationships?

With the arrival of numerous effective vaccines, the battle against COVID-19 has shifted to getting the jab to as many people as possible. And now tech giant Google has added vaccination site locations to Google Map and Search in the US, Canada, France, Chile, India and Singapore in a bid to help speed up the process. Users simply type'vaccination sites' to get a map with pins tagging various locations near them which provide the injections. Google AI is also powering'virtual agents' that can help individuals find out if they're eligible for vaccination, book an appointment and even get reminders as the date approaches. The internet giant announced it is sponsoring pop-up vaccination sites across the US targeting marginalized communities and donating 250,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to countries in need.

If it hasn't already, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to your contact center -- and not just in the form of the ubiquitous chatbots that pop up with their friendly greetings on the company sites you visit. Those can be helpful in many ways, yes… but the full benefits of AI come in its infusion throughout the contact center process. One of the biggest challenges you'll face is selecting the right AI solution for your operation. Your best bet is to evaluate how well it 1) converses with customers and 2) assists human agents when the self-service interactions become too complex for a virtual agent to complete on its own. And, of course, you'll want to make sure the AI solution you select integrates seamlessly with your existing contact center technology.

Google today announced that it has signed up Verizon as the newest customer of its Google Cloud Contact Center AI service, which aims to bring natural language recognition to the often inscrutable phone menus that many companies still use today (disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of the Verizon Media Group). For Google, that's a major win, but it's also a chance for the Google Cloud team to highlight some of the work it has done in this area. It's also worth noting that the Contact Center AI product is a good example of Google Cloud's strategy of packaging up many of its disparate technologies into products that solve specific problems. "A big part of our approach is that machine learning has enormous power but it's hard for people," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told me in an interview ahead of today's announcement. "Instead of telling people, 'well, here's our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text -- and why don't you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?' Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it's much easier for them when we do that and […] that it's a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers."

Whatever it is they're selling, businesses today are under more pressure than ever to provide a five-star experience. Customer service is not a'nice-to-have', it's taken for granted by customers who have plenty of eager competitors at their disposal and a multitude of public forums to share their negative experiences. In times of need, if customers can't open a chatbot or pick up a phone to quickly get resolution to their issues, they'll start shopping around – customer experience is now part of the package. Meeting these real-time demands, then, is a deal-breaker, but there are also rewards. According to McKinsey, 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated, and if you do it right, they will stick around.

Adoption of artificial intelligence continues to increase in U.S. contact centers. According to Canam Research, 78% of contact centers in the U.S. report plans to deploy artificial intelligence in their contact center in the next 3 years, with an overwhelming number (97%) of survey respondents planning to use artificial intelligence to support agents as opposed to 7% who plan to use AI to replace some or all of their current call center staff. Top uses of artificial intelligence include bots, self-service, and AI for quality management. These insights stem from a survey sponsored by Bright Pattern, the leading provider of AI-powered omnichannel cloud contact center software for innovative enterprises. The survey examined the current state of U.S. contact centers' usage and preferences around artificial intelligence in the contact centers.

Google Cloud is making Contact Center AI generally available for use today. The cloud service is built with conversational AI engine Dialogflow to automate interactions with customers in call centers. Contact Center AI contains Virtual Agent to automatically respond to customer queries with voice or text or handoff the conversation to a person when a bot is unable to help a customer. Agent Assist uses natural language processing to augment customer service agent interactions with customers when a bot is unable to help a customer. The news comes today as Google pushed its rich communication services (RCS) to Android Messages users in the United States, and days after Google's experimental unit Area 120 CallJoy service for answering phone calls and customer questions for small businesses got an upgrade.

What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence Google Cloud on Thursday announced the general availability of Contact Center AI. The contact center software enables businesses to deploy virtual agents for basic customer interactions, and it offers an "agent assist" feature to transcribe calls, recommend workflows and provide other kinds of AI-driven assistance. Google also announced updates to Dialogflow, the development suite for building conversational interfaces such as chat bots and interactive voice responses (IVR). With a new agent validation feature, designers can get feedback on the quality and performance of their virtual agents. Dialogflow also now supports compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards.

Many enterprises see the value in applying AI and machine learning to their business challenges, but not all have the necessary resources to do it. Where should your organization begin if you don't already have a team of data scientists, or if your team is fully committed to other tasks? Businesses need a quick and easy way to bring AI to their organizations. From the beginning, our goal has been to make AI accessible to as many businesses as possible. For example, last year we introduced Cloud AutoML to help businesses with limited ML expertise start building their own high-quality custom models.

Machine learning: AI programs are able to use machine learning to adapt to different circumstances and data patterns. This could include being able to detect sarcasm, mimicking, the change in volume and the change in pitch of a consumer to gain real-time insights into how a customer is feeling about a conversation. Big data: Artificial intelligence is able to find patterns in large amounts of varied, fast-moving data to give customer service agents real-time data that empowers them to offer the best possible customer service. Natural language processing: Natural language processing allows AI programs to understand language as spoken and written by humans, and reply to them as a human would. Through complex algorithms, chatbots are able to create a back-and-forth dialogue with customers and either answers their question or collate enough detailed data to direct them to a relevant customer service agent who can provide greater value to the customer.