Innovations propel Espressive Barista beyond conversational chatbots

Espressive, a pioneer in AI for enterprise service management (ESM), has announced additions to its AI-based virtual support agent (VSA), Barista, which includes the new Barista Employee Language Cloud.

With the additions, Barista goes beyond conversational chatbots to enable digital transformation of ESM to improve the delivery of AI-based employee self-help.

While competitors require custom development on platforms or toolkits, or implement searchbot technology that requires a solid knowledge base foundation that most organizations do not have, Expressive says, Barista comes with an extensive vocabulary tailored to the workplace. Currently, Barista understands more than 15 million phrases and 4,000 topics out of the box.

The company also introduced workflow-based experiences and QR codes that take Barista beyond conversational chatbots to deliver employee experiences that solve real business issues. In addition, continuous learning and omni-channel capabilities speed employee adoption, which in turn automates the resolution of ever-growing help desk call volumes. Together, these new innovations represent the next gen approach for redefining how employees get help.

Unlike first gen approaches that have long deployment times and are dependent on continuously adding and updating knowledge base articles, the Employee Language Cloud enables faster deployment without the need to hire AI talent or engage professional services. The Employee Language Cloud incorporates AI technologies that enable Barista to understand what employees are saying in workplace language, provide a personalized response and uses machine learning to identify the correct team or department when a question can’t be immediately answered. In addition, the Employee Language Cloud is constantly growing, because as employees ask questions, Barista learns new phrases, phrase structures, synonyms and topics.

The Employee Language Cloud also contains answers to topics that can have a significant impact during times of change. For example, according to Espressive, if an organization is transitioning to Office 365 or G Suite, the most common questions and answers related to those events are already in the Employee Language Cloud, which keeps help desks from being inundated with questions and keeps employee productivity high. As new use cases are developed, content is available to all Espressive customers, while proprietary answers are never shared. In fact, the flexibility of the Employee Language Cloud permits the addition of a customer’s proprietary application, or internal buzzwords, acronyms and app names, ensuring employees can use their own language versus learning something new.

“AI is well positioned to enable digital transformation in IT and beyond, but it could just as easily turn into a lengthy, expensive, failed proposition,” said Pat Calhoun, CEO and founder of Espressive. “We believe that AI for employee self-help needs to advance from platforms and searchbots to pre-built consumer-like apps to gain widespread adoption.”

For more information, go to www.espressive.com.