Voicebot Gateway

The Voicebot Gateway improves the handling of certain events during interactions between voice virtual agentsClosed A software application that handles customer interactions in place of a live human agent. and contactsClosed The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center., particularly when the contact is in a noisy environment. It improves the handling of:

Additionally, depending on your transcription provider, Voicebot Gateway allows fine-tuning of the transcription behaviors, such as adding words to the lexicon and boosting or suppressing certain words. It uses CXone Continuous Stream Transcription, which supports several transcription providers. In the management console for the provider you use, you can customize the transcription to meet the needs of your organization.

There may be additional charges for using a Continuous Stream Transcription service with CXone. Depending on how your virtual agent provider charges for using its service you may be charged separately for transcription. For example, some virtual agent providers charge per minute for transcription, while others bundle transcription costs into the fees to use the virtual agent service. However, Voicebot Gateway does not add charges for transcription on top of any costs from Continuous Stream Transcription and third-party virtual agent provider transcription.

Barge Events and End-of-Utterance Control

Voicebot Gateway continuously transcribes the audio from conversations between the contactClosed The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center. and a voice virtual agentClosed A software application that handles customer interactions in place of a live human agent.. It detects the end of an utteranceClosed What a contact says or types. based on the settings and algorithms that the transcription provider uses. Each utterance, or utterance event, is transcribed and sent to the virtual agent, which responds.

Barge events are triggered when the virtual agent receives an utterance event from the transcription provider while it is responding during an interaction. This approach is different from the original Virtual Agent Hub barge functionality, which used audio energy to detect barge events. Using audio energy caused problems because non-conversational noise, such as the contact being in a noisy location, would falsely trigger a barge event. Voicebot Gateway eliminates this problem because it only initiates barge events when words are detected by the transcription provider.

Similarly, allowing the transcription provider to determine the end of each utterance provides more accurate detection of each utterance event, depending on the capabilities of the transcription provider. The original Virtual Agent Hub end-of-utterance detection was also based on audio energy. Just like with barge, this was less effective when the contact was in a noisy environment, because the integrated systems had a hard time telling whether the audio energy it received was the contact speaking or the background noise.

Prerequisites for Setup

Before setting up Voicebot Gateway:

  • Your virtual agent must be configured in the provider's management console.
  • Virtual Agent Hub must be enabled in CXone.
  • Create a virtual agent configuration app in Virtual Agent Hub. It must be configured to use Virtual Agent Hub integration version 3.0.
    • If it uses integration version 1.0 or 2.0, it must be updated to version 3.0 before you can set up Voicebot Gateway. Your scripts will also need to be updated and validated to work with integration version 3.0.
    • The Voicebot Exchange actions in all Studio scripts that handle virtual agent interactions must be configured to use virtual agent configuration apps that are set to integration version 3.0.
  • Have a Next Prompt Behaviors snippet in your virtual agent script, configured with the options you want your virtual agent to perform.
  • Your CXone Account Representative must enable Transcription Hub and Continuous Stream Transcription in all CXone business unitsClosed High-level organizational grouping used to manage technical support, billing, and global settings for your CXone environment that will use Voicebot Gateway.

Set Up for Voicebot Gateway

  1. Set up Continuous Stream Transcription. You can use any provider that Continuous Stream Transcription supports.
  2. Add the Continuous Transcription Studio action to your virtual agent script. Place the action early in the script and before the Voicebot Exchange action. It should not be part of any loop that includes Voicebot Exchange.

  3. Configure the following properties of Continuous Transcription as shown:

    • Participants: Set to Patron.
    • GenerateUtteranceEvents: Set to True.

    Additional properties may need to be configured. Refer to the Continuous Transcription action online help for more information.

  4. In the Next Prompt Behaviors snippet in your script, add the following configurations: 

    • defaultNextPromptBehaviors.audioCollectionRules.bargeConfiguration.enableSpeakerBarge="true"

    • defaultNextPromptBehaviors.audioCollectionRules.utteranceConfig.useContinuousTranscription="1"

    • defaultNextPromptBehaviors.audioCollectionRules.bargeConfiguration.bargeOnUtteranceBeginRatherThanEnd="1"

  5. Remove or comment out the maxPostEnergySilenceMS, maxUtteranceMilliseconds , and millisecondsToWaitForUserResponse parameters from the Next Prompt Behaviors snippet. These parameters are not used in Voicebot Gateway.

  6. Make the same changes in any other Next Prompt Behaviors snippets in your script, if they need to control barge or end of utterance. If you have a Default Next Prompt Behaviors snippet in your script and it needs to control these behaviors, make the changes to it as well.