Salesforce today rolled out the next generation of Service Cloud, including enhancements to Cloud Voice and Einstein Bots. The company says that the features and products are intended to address the new reality brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past year, service agents moved quickly to work from home but were forced to rely on legacy technology that wasn't designed to manage distributed workforces. Today, parts of the world are beginning to reopen, but these reopenings are raising questions around updated policies, protocols, and safety measures. This adds a new level of challenge for agents, who are already contending with increased workloads.

There are many reasons why you would want to leverage Watson Assistant to make your Einstein Bot "better". In a previous blog, I spoke to just some of the key reasons why you would need to do so. I will provide additional detail here but first, let's look at how you integrate Watson into your Einstein Bot. The obvious table stakes, you need a Watson Assistant service to integrate with Bots. If you don't already have one, you can get a free IBM Cloud account to deploy a Watson Assistant service, which you can do in about a minute, also for free.

One of the most impactful ways that bots can improve conversations is to pick up on the important details you've mentioned and reference them later without asking you to repeat things. Imagine if you called up an airline and said that you want to book a flight to Hawaii. If the airline employee were to reply with "Happy to book you a flight, where would you like to go?" you'd begin to question whether they were paying attention. Few bots have been set up to do this well and as a consequence run the risk of delivering a slow, rigid, repetitive experience. Automated natural language systems are notoriously bad at handling these important details and fail to deliver a natural and brief conversation without redundant messages.

What exactly are they, Einstein bots? Generally speaking, a bot is an autonomous program on the internet that interacts with clients, users, or systems. Think of it as a computer chess player. A'person' to learn a new language with, online. Or an online customer service rep (chatbot) to sort getting your faulty new shoes replaced.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to become a big part of the customer relationship management (CRM) space in the future. Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) estimates that AI-related CRM spending will jump nearly five-fold to $46.3 billion in 2021 from 2016 levels. This is why Salesforce is busy integrating AI features into its services, and its latest addition could help it attack a lucrative niche of the CRM space. Salesforce's Einstein AI platform has caught the limelight because of its ability to predict sales outcomes based on the data fed into it, but it can now do more thanks to a recent upgrade. It is now capable of taking on customer service chores after the addition of the Einstein Bots for Service feature.

Salesforce is rolling out customer service capabilities in the latest upgrade to its Einstein AI with the aim of making things easier for its clients. Up until now Einstein functioned as an assistant that aided Salesforce users in making predictions using the data collected from the company's SaaS platform with one version of the AI was also capable of making suggestions to customer service workers. With the latest upgrade though, Salesforce is expanding on its customer service offerings with Einstein Bots for Service which can automate routine service requests and enable frictionless agent handoffs. Customer service is often quite expensive for businesses because they have to train numerous employees who often tire of the tedious job quickly. This makes the whole ordeal even more costly and often leads to unsatisfied customers.

San Francisco: Salesforce has announced myEinstein at its annual Dramforce conference, a machine learning platform that enables its admins and developers of all skill levels to build custom artificial intelligence (AI) apps "with clicks, without being a data scientist". The myEinstein platform is touted as a tool that allows Salesforce customers to build smarter and more personalised experiences via two new services, the first of which is Einstein Prediction Builder, a tool that enables automatic creation of custom AI models that can predict outcomes for any field or object in Salesforce. The second service is something called Einstein Bots, which can be trained to augment customer service workflows by automating tasks such as answering questions and retrieving information. "We are further democratising AI by empowering admins and developers to transform every process and customer interaction to be more intelligent with myEinstein," said Salesforce's GM and SVP of Einstein John Ball. "No other company is arming customers with both pre-built AI apps for CRM and the ability to build and customise their own with just clicks."

A robotics firm has built an Artificial Intelligence minibot that talks, walks and even looks like famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. The firm, Hanson Robotics, specializes in designing human-like robots that are capable of displaying facial expressions and understanding speech. The Professor Einstein robot can solve math problems, recognize your voice and even hold a conversation. The robotics firm launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter this month to fund the production of the Einstein bot. The firm is aiming to begin production of the bot in March this year, with rewards sent to backers in April.