Contact Center AI: 15 Essential Voice Features

Building a voice bot is fundamentally different from creating a chat-based counterpart. Factors such as speech processing accuracy, an on-brand voice persona, and the challenge of compensating for the absence of visual cues and conversation history are just a few considerations a voice UX designer must navigate.

While many might choose to get away with a chat-focused conversational solution, a voice-native platform is just what it takes to elevate voice services from mediocre to exhilarating, memorable call experiences.

At Cognigy, voice is our first-class citizen. We're committed to helping you build and deploy cutting-edge virtual agents on the phone—while ensuring the process is enjoyable. Not convinced? Explore the 15 advanced features that make Cognigy.AI the premier choice for automating customer service on voice.

Hyper-realistic VUX

1. Humanlike Voices

Voice is more than a means of communication; it’s integral to emotional connection, crucial for delivering empathy and building trust. A humanlike voice can differentiate your brand by embodying your unique identity and values.

To help you deliver the most realistic conversations with the least setup time, Cognigy.AI integrates with over 1,000 synthetic voices, including leading GenAI-powered voices from ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Microsoft, and AWS. You can also host custom speech providers and adopt custom voices, such as cloned voices, that best represent your brand. Listen in here.

2. Best-in-class STT

Speech recognition determines your AI Agent’s ability to process customer input accurately, which directly impacts service quality. Cognigy natively integrates with top STT vendors (Deepgram, Microsoft, AWS, Google, Nuance, and Soniox) and allows you to incorporate any third-party STT solution, including on-premises deployments. Additionally, you can create custom-trained speech models for specific use cases and dynamically switch models based on context to optimize recognition accuracy.

3. Atmosphere Sounds and Silence Overlay

Latency in voice AI systems is inevitable due to various technical factors, from STT and TTS conversion to backend data retrieval and third-party API calls, such as LLMs. While technology cannot eliminate this inherent latency, effective use of psycholinguistics and best practices in conversation design can manage it.

Cognigy.AI’s Silence Overlay feature allows you to fill response gaps with meaningful pre-rendered sounds, such as keyboard typing, giving the impression of instant understanding and keeping users engaged. Taking a step further, you can enrich the entire AI Agent’s audio stream with Atmosphere Sounds that simulate a contact center ambiance, exemplifying a hyper-realistic VUX.

Intelligent Dialogues

4. Cutting-edge AI

Cognigy integrates its proven NLU engine with leading LLMs to deliver unparalleled understanding and dynamic, personalized responses. By grasping broader context and nuances such as emotions, sarcasm, and idiomatic expressions, our voice AI agents provide appropriately tailored responses, enabling natural, coherent, and meaningful interactions. With Cognigy’s AI orchestration layer, you can harness LLM within the systematic guardrails of Conversational AI to effectively mitigate risks like hallucinations and prompt injections.

To compensate for the absence of visual cues, Cognigy xApps offers a parallel interaction channel that is seamlessly connected with and enhances the overall voice experience. 

5. Integrated Digression Handling and Escalation 

The importance of an error handling and escalation strategy cannot be emphasized enough, particularly on voice channels where visual guidance is often absent. To intuitively handle wrong turns and avoid conversation dead-ends, we provide various escalation procedures – from simple actions like rephrasing the message or skipping the question to advanced measures like executing an alternative flow or transferring the call to live agents.

6. Language Recognition and Real-Time Translation

If your customer access strategy includes localizing voice services, good news – Cognigy.AI is built from the ground up to make the creation and deployment of multilingual phone bots extremely simple. Multiple approaches are available: you can pre-translate and localize content and intent models with just a few clicks, or the voice agent can dynamically switch to and converse in the customer’s language using advanced real-time translation.

Advanced Voice Design and Testing

7. Perfect Your AI Speech with Low-Code SSML Editor

A humanlike voice is the building block for natural-sounding AI speech, but it isn’t the only factor. Emphasis, prosody, pause, volume, and pitch all play into the overall experience. Adding breaks between words or emphasizing the right words might sound like minor tweaks but they go a long way in achieving human parity in voice design.

Our SSML editor allows fine-grained control over these voice elements. The built-in markup templates make the editor accessible to non-technical users while providing voice UX developers with a solid starting point.

8. Click-and-call Softphone for Real-Time Testing

Frequent, ongoing testing is crucial for maintaining healthy and reliable AI performance. Cognigy’s built-in softphone lets you place a call directly from the Interaction Panel with a single click. This enables you to review the end-to-end experience during AI agent development, easing QA and maintenance by orders of magnitude. It uses the same telephony system as the end customers and replicates 100% real-world bot behavior.

9. Voice Preview for Granular Experience Review

With customer needs and business offerings constantly evolving, fast delivery and continuous improvements are essential to keep your voice service up to date. With large and complex AI Agent workflows, you need to adjust and review specific parts of conversations quickly.

Cognigy.AI allows you to modify call settings at any point in the conversation flow and instantly preview audio experiences with zero latency. Our unique Voice Preview capability enables detailed inspection of your speech flow, down to individual responses.

10. Live Follow a Real-World Conversation

After finalizing your AI agent’s workflow, a common way to test-drive the overall user experience is to dial in using an external mobile device. Using Live Follow, you can retrieve the entire conversation in the Flow Editor in real-time as it progresses to spot frictions for debugging immediately.

Advanced Call Control

11. Barge-in and Continuous ASR 

Voice interactions require accommodating varied user speech speeds and styles. Cognigy’s barge-in and continuous Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) ensure an intuitive, humanlike experience. Barge-in allows users to interrupt the system while it’s speaking, enhancing user control. On the other hand, continuous ASR lets you manage the length of silence detection, preventing the AI agent from mistaking pauses for the end of utterances, especially in long, complex responses. 

12. Outbound Calling

A versatile AI Workforce goes beyond reactive support. They can proactively identify customer needs, offering tailored follow-ups, product recommendations, contract renewals, appointment scheduling and much more. Cognigy lets you easily initiate outbound calls for proactive customer engagement, improving communication efficiency and fostering loyalty. 

13. Call Recording and Quality Management

Call recording is vital for effective monitoring and improving service quality in contact centers. Cognigy Voice Gateway lets you not only record all conversations with ease but also inspect and examine the performance of voice AI Agents effectively. The Call Tracing feature offers actionable visualization of all call activities, including speech recognition and connections, together with the call recording waveforms. This offers deep insights into voice interactions, helping you optimize response timing, resolve overlapping speech, and ensure consistent AI speech. 

Seamless Contact Center Integration

14. Plug-and-Play Contact Center Connectivity

Cognigy.AI supports integration with virtually any voice infrastructure, be it CCaaS, CPaaS, on-premises contact centers, or PSTN and PBX telephony networks – through prebuilt connectors or generic SIP and WebRTC interfaces. This agility allows you to tackle the complete spectrum of voice use cases, from conversational IVR, self-service, and outbound calling to agent assist and real-time translation on voice. Plus, it saves you integration hassle to focus on customer experiences and shorten time-to-market. 

15. Real-time Agent Assistance

With Cognigy Voice Gateway, our AI Agents don’t just seamlessly hand over the conversation to a human agent but can also remain on the call and offer proactive support with anything they need. From real-time knowledge lookup and recommendations on next-best actions to sentiment analysis, live translation, and automated wrap-up, our Agent Copilot empowers your team to excel. 

To learn more about Cognigy.AI’s voice capabilities, visit our documentation.