Sinch AB (publ), a global leader in cloud communications and mobile customer engagement, today announced it is launching AskFrank, its AI-enabled intelligent question-answering search engine. AskFrank integrates with a business’s existing customer engagement chatbots, contact center, website, or knowledge base. Using AI to search content, it adds value to chatbots as an extension which provides answers to questions that are not available in a chatbot’s database by expanding its information access.
Named AskFrank because the answers it gives are frank, direct, and honest; it does not work with keywords like other search engines but instead searches content based on the subject and the meaning. This means that even if the user does not know the right keywords to enter, they can still find out what they are looking for. By periodically analyzing content from Confluence, Sharepoint, FAQ pages, and other knowledgebases, AskFrank can make vast quantities of data searchable by indexing it within its database. So, whatever the question asked, AskFrank can look for the most appropriate answers by using state-of-art machine learning algorithms.
AskFrank helps businesses to:
- Build their own AI chatbots faster and easier by connecting AskFrank to existing internal and external knowledge bases
- Understand natural language to answer users’ questions properly
- Provide information to chatbots and contact center agents to quickly respond to customers on their preferred channel
- Respond in more than 100 languages
- Unify content from multiple sources
- Enable their chatbots to self-learn from a more comprehensive conversation history
- Reduce the number of common questions to the contact center, allowing agents to focus on solving the more challenging issues
“In an economy where more and more organisations are relying on chatbots to engage with their customers to lower operating costs, we are seeing customers often frustrated in cases when a chatbot can’t provide them the right answer,” said Sunny Dhami, VP, Product Marketing, Sinch. “Therefore, Sinch built AskFrank to improve the level of accuracy and customer experience in customer communication. Available to Sinch’s customers using our conversational AI platform, Chatlayer, and cloud contact center solution, Contact Pro, AskFrank improves any chatbot’s capability to understand natural language much better, so supporting agents in offering response suggestions so that they become more efficient, and fewer customers are forwarded to second- and third-line support.”
Software & Support Media is an international publishing house with a focus on the IT sector. The company’s information and service teams used an initial proof of concept of AskFrank to improve customer engagement with IT professionals in its key technology markets.
“We had a simple requirement, to deliver the easiest way for our users to find answers to complex software problems from tens of thousands of technical articles and videos on our entwickler.de and devm.io
“Not only can AskFrank quickly respond to customers on any of their preferred channels, it can also reply in over 100 different languages, even slang, delivering accurate answers by combining content from multiple sources. These features make AskFrank practically a virtual employee handling full conversations with customers, instead of just answering single questions, and becoming first line support to assist service agents,” said Pieter Buteneers, Director of Engineering in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Sinch.
