Tag Archive for: gluon

Wishing you Joy & Good Cheer This Season & in the New Year!

The end of 2022 is nearly here and as we reflect on the past year, the Creative Virtual team want to express our thanks to all of our blog readers, customers, and partners. We appreciate you!

The last 12 months brought lots of exciting developments for the conversational AI industry and us as a company. We reflected on some of these in our 2022 in Review blog post. Since that look back was published, one of our other blog posts – Can Conversational AI Make Your CX More Human and Empathic? – won first place in the CX Technology category of the 2022 Customer Experience Update MVP Awards!

While it’s always nice to end the year celebrating a win, we’re also busy looking forward to 2023. We have some exciting things in the works, including a new chatbot buyer’s guide and the next release of our V-Person™ technology. While you wait for those, be sure to check out our other educational resources and subscribe to our Blog – if you haven’t already, of course!

On behalf of all of us around the world at Creative Virtual, we wish you joy and good cheer this season and in the new year!

Not All Chatbots are Conversational AI Solutions

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Over the past several years businesses around the world have faced significant hardships and uncertainty. As these difficulties continue and new challenges arise, the IT sector will play a critical role in keeping companies connected and enabling them to adapt. SME News Magazine is recognising this with their newly established IT Awards programme.

The new IT Awards honour companies that are driving forward innovation and focusing on client-centricity while remaining true experts in their industry. I’m excited to share that Creative Virtual has been awarded Best Conversational AI Solutions 2022!

Creative Virtual has built our reputation as a conversational AI leader by consistently delivering successful and innovative solutions to our customers and partners for nearly two decades. It’s an honour to be recognised by the SME News IT Awards as the best in the industry – especially since this award comes on the heels of us being named the Conversational AI Innovation Excellence Leader by AIxOutlook.

Having worked in the virtual agent and chatbot field since 2000, I’ve experienced first-hand how these solutions and technologies have changed. It’s been exciting to lead one of the companies that has helped drive innovation forward in the industry. The virtual agents of today are certainly not the same as those I was working on 20 years ago.

What has also changed over this time is the variety of names used for these solutions. In fact, there have been so many names, and such little agreement amongst industry experts and analysts on how these names are used, that there is a lingering confusion in the market. Virtual agents, chatbots, virtual assistants, virtual customer assistants, intelligent virtual agents – the list goes on. In general, all these names can be, and often are, regularly used interchangeably to describe solutions.

Most recently, the industry has adopted the name of ‘conversational AI’. However, conversational AI is more than just another name for these solutions. It is more specifically describing the technology behind them. While a virtual agent, chatbot, or virtual assistant can be a conversational AI solution, not all of them currently deployed today are.

This raises an important question: What makes a virtual agent or chatbot a true conversational AI solution?

There’s lots of discussions about how successful conversational AI tools use artificial intelligence, both in the initial development stage and to continuously improve as part of the ongoing maintenance. This is vitally important for identifying real conversational AI solutions, of course. It isn’t the only identifier though. Too often overlooked is the need for integration and personalisation.

True conversational AI virtual agents and chatbots are backed by a platform that enables flexible integration with a variety of other technologies and systems. This includes knowledge management platforms, ticketing systems, live chat technologies, contact centre platforms, voice systems, real-time information feeds, multiple intent engines, CRMs, messaging platforms – to name a few.

These integrations help create conversational and personalised engagements. Personalisation goes beyond just knowing a logged-in user’s name and account or order details. It’s also about personalising the experience based on the user’s engagement channel, location, language, job title or member status, saved preferences – to name a few.

True conversational AI goes beyond a basic FAQ chatbot to deliver solutions that are customised for the business and for the individual users. As we’ve developed and improved our V-Person™ technology over the years, we’ve always maintained a focus on integration and personalisation. In fact, V-Person is recognised as the first virtual agent solution to successfully deliver personalisation by both Gartner and Patricia Seybold Group. We are continuing that focus with our upcoming Gluon Release which will make it quicker and easier to build, deploy, and maintain integrated, personalised conversational AI solutions.

If you’d like to learn more about Creative Virtual’s true conversational AI solutions and get an early look at our next big V-Person release, arrange a personalised demo session with one of our experts.

My thanks to SME News and their research team for our Best Conversational AI Solutions recognition! Congratulations to the Creative Virtual team for another well-deserved award!

Wishing you a Season that’s Magical & Bright!

As we wrap up another year at Creative Virtual, our entire team around the world want to say a big thank you to all of our blog readers, customers, and partners!

2021 brought both challenges and celebrations for us as a company and the wider conversational AI industry, and we’re ending it looking forward to what is to come next year. In particular, we’re excited about the next big release of our V-Person™ technology, Gluon. You can find a special sneak peek here. We are also excited about the brand new ebook we recently published to help organisations solve common issues they are having with their conversational AI projects. You can get your copy of the ebook here. Be sure to subscribe to our Blog (if you aren’t already!) so you don’t miss our Gluon release announcements and new educational resources in 2022.

On behalf of all of us at Creative Virtual, wishes for a magical, festive end to 2021 and a new year full of even more bright moments!

Putting in the Hard Work for That Moment of Recognition

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

I recently attended an awards event organised by ISG where we collected Creative Virtual’s trophy for being named a Leader in the ISG Provider Lens™ for Conversational AI. It was such an honour to be recognised as a leader in a field that contains such technology giants as Microsoft, IBM and Google. After so many virtual events, it was an unusual experience from the very beginning: putting on a business suit after 18+ months of varying degrees of lockdowns and restrictions; meeting so many people face-to-face in such close proximity; and the different ways people have modified their interactions.

There were certainly some different behaviours on display from the last awards ceremony I attended pre-pandemic. Some people wanted to shake hands, some preferred fist bumps, some people wore a mask between dinner courses and sips of wine. What wasn’t different was it being wonderful to celebrate the successes of all the companies being recognised.

Several speakers made jokes about their suits shrinking during the months of lockdown. As I looked around the room, there were certainly many nods of agreement to comments about the ‘Lockdown Bulge’. I had recently taken part in the London Marathon so felt somewhat smug! That got me thinking about the parallels of receiving corporate awards, like this honour from ISG, and completing a marathon.

Accepting an award on behalf of Creative Virtual is always an honour for me. Running a successful technology company with such a great and dedicated team and collaborating with some of the world’s leading organisations is a privilege. There is so much effort, over many years, that goes into making that brief moment possible. A brief moment of joy: stepping on stage, with the loud music and camera flashes, to collect the trophy. It is the same with running a marathon: all that training, the big push on race day which invariably includes pushing through the pain barrier at around the 20-mile mark, culminates in stepping across the finish line and collecting your medal.

All that hard work and dedication leads to that one moment of recognition and celebration. But I think the brevity of these moments is what makes them even more special. In our busy lives, when we’re in need of a boost, we can easily recall those climatic moments that put a smile on our faces. I believe that because these moments are so brief, we are driven to innovate more and train harder in order to experience more of them.

The Creative Virtual team is still hard at work to ensure we are delivering the conversational AI technology and expertise our clients and partners need for success. We are also living up to our status as industry leader by investing in the next generation of our V-Person™ technology. We aren’t doing all of this for awards and trophies, but being recognised by an important analyst group like ISG does provide a little extra motivation!

Congratulations to the global Creative Virtual team on being a Leader in the ISG Provider Lens™ for Conversational AI! And thank you to the team at ISG for organising a wonderful evening of celebrations.

Check out ISG’s Conversational AI quadrant and report here to learn more about why they have named us an industry leader.

The Best Conversational AI Now and in the Future

By Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO

Recently Corporate Vision Magazine announced the winners of their 2021 Media Innovator Awards. Creative Virtual proudly accepted the award for ‘Best Conversational AI Solutions Provider – London’! This award recognises our London-headquartered company for our expertise in both developing conversational AI technology and delivering skilled consultation for implementing and maintaining solutions.

We’re coming up on eighteen years since I founded Creative Virtual, and so much has changed in the chatbot and virtual agent space since those early days. As a company, we’ve played a key role in both establishing and advancing the conversational AI market. It’s always an honour to be called the best, but that certainly doesn’t happen by chance. It requires the hard work and collaboration of our entire global team as well as strong relationships with our customers and partners.

Being a leader in a quickly evolving technology space, like the conversational AI industry, also requires a continuous emphasis on innovation. More specifically, that innovation must be focused on helping companies tackle their real challenges and deliver real results, now and in the future. That’s why I’m excited to be receiving this award as we are preparing for our next big product launch in 2022.

Our upcoming Gluon release of V-Person™ is the next generation of our award-winning conversational AI. It draws from our nearly two decades of experience in the industry to deliver updates to our chatbot, virtual agent, and live chat technologies. Gluon also features a re-architecture of V-Portal™, our innovative orchestration platform. The updated user interface will make it easier for our customers and partners to deploy and maintain their conversational AI solutions without compromising on any of the advanced enterprise-grade functionality they rely on to deliver personalised, seamless experiences.

A few of the innovations and features of the Gluon release include:

  • Enhanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning
  • Microservices, widgetisation, and containerisation
  • Support for low-code and no-code
  • Ability to interface with multiple intent engines, CRMs, contact centre platforms, and voice technologies
  • Machine comprehension
  • Sophisticated dialogue management, personalisation, and entity extraction

The updates and innovations in our Gluon release are focused on enabling organisations to create accurate, reliable conversational AI solutions quicker and easier than ever. We give them complete control over the AI with a perfect blend of machine learning and natural language rules so there is never a machine learning black box to fear. All of this is designed to help organisations reach their goals for delivering better experiences for their customer, employees, and contact centre agents.

Congratulations to the Creative Virtual team on being named ‘Best Conversational AI Solutions Provider’! And thank you for your contributions to our upcoming product release, supporting our customers and partners with your expertise, and helping us deliver the best chatbot, virtual agent, and live chat solutions every day!

You can read our official award announcement here and watch a sneak peek video on our Gluon release here.

My thanks also to the Media Innovator Awards judges for recognising Creative Virtual’s conversational AI technology and expertise!

Teamwork Makes the Conversational AI Dream Work

By Mandy Reed, Global Head of Marketing

At Creative Virtual, we are dedicated to working as a team to help our customers and partners reach their customer experience and employee support goals. It’s at the heart of everything we do, from the initial development stages of our conversational AI technology to the ongoing evolution of  V-Person™ deployments that have been live for a decade or more. The fact that our very first enterprise-level customer has worked with us continuously since 2004 tells us that we are doing something right!

While we don’t do what we do for external awards and recognitions, it’s always a nice boost for morale to have experts in the industry acknowledge Creative Virtual’s expertise and success. We are proud that our dedication and teamwork have led us to be named a Conversational AI Leader by the analysts at ISG in their ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation – Solutions & Services report!

Here’s Mrinal Rai, Lead Analyst at ISG Research, explaining why Creative Virtual has been identified as a Leader in Conversational AI:

 

 

In their Quadrant Report, the ISG analysts evaluated 19 conversational AI vendors against a robust set of market-driven criteria. They found Creative Virtual to be “an established vendor with a focus on developing omnichannel virtual agent solutions” and a clear Leader in the space.

Conversational AI

If you want to learn more, you can:

  • Review a copy of the ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation – Solutions & Services report featuring the Conversational AI Quadrant: Download here >>
  • Explore a discussion on conversational AI featuring expert insights from Mrinal Rai, Lead Analyst at ISG, Jan Erik Aase, Partner & Global Head – ISG Provider Lens, and Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO of Creative Virtual: Watch on YouTube >>
  • Arrange a personalised demo with the Creative Virtual team to see our conversational AI technology in action: Request demo here >>

We know that to continue to be a Conversational AI Leader, we must keep working as a team to ensure our solutions are both innovative and delivering real business benefits. The entire company is currently collaborating on our next product release, Gluon, set to be introduced to the market next year. This release includes updates to our chatbot, virtual agent, and live chat technologies as well as a re-architecture of our V-Portal™ orchestration platform. Be sure to check out our Gluon sneak peek.

Our thanks to the team at ISG for naming us a Conversational AI Leader and sending us this great video. And to echo Mrinal’s well wishes: Congratulations Team Creative Virtual!