2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: LivePerson Centers on Conversational AI

LivePerson has been developing conversational technologies since its founding in 1995. A central piece in its technology portfolio for the past few years has been the Conversational Cloud, which the New York-based company launched in August 2020. Conversational Cloud enables companies to instantly respond to messages, answer questions, resolve customer intents, and route to human experts as needed. Conversational artificial intelligence, which communicates like a human by recognizing speech, text, and intent, is at the heart of the Conversational Cloud and provides the personalized, high-touch experiences that consumers demand.

Conversational Cloud this year got a major upgrade that brings additional AI to bear. The new capabilities include advanced routing and self-learning technology, integrations with thousands of apps, sales attribution, and better ways to track and deliver conversational commerce.

LivePerson’s new commerce capabilities help companies capture the massive opportunity of conversational commerce, attribute it correctly, and even automate commerce conversations.

Furthering its move into commerce, LivePerson also launched Conversational Marketplaces to help online retailers integrate messaging and conversational AI into their digital storefronts.

A highlight of LivePerson’s moves into new technology streams within its existing areas of specialty was the launch early this summer of Contact Center Conversation Mining for tracking, measuring, and optimizing customer experiences. Developed with Celonis, Contact Center Conversation Mining allows companies to map customer journeys across systems and interactions; identify patterns in customer behavior; break conversations down into segment-level data; unlock insights from conversational data, including sentiment and intent; and convert those insights into intelligent action through automation and workflows.

More innovation from LivePerson bolstered its Conversation Assist, part of the larger Conversational Cloud. The upgraded Conversation Assist capabilities provide agents with AI-driven, real-time recommendations for inserting content and bots directly into customer conversations. The recommendation engine can draw from many sources at once, including company knowledge bases, automations built through LivePerson’s Conversation Builder, and bots from third-party platforms like Google DialogFlow and IBM Watson. A dashboard of rich analytics can help companies monitor and improve recommendation performance and agent engagement.

LivePerson also partnered with Afiniti to bring together chatbot and contact center messaging to help companies deliver more human, personalized shopping experiences, match customers with agents based on how well they are likely to interact, and deliver more humanlike conversations in both live and asynchronous experiences on the customers’ preferred digital channels.

LivePerson’s entire product portfolio got perhaps its biggest lift, though, last October with the purchase of VoiceBase, a provider of real-time speech recognition and conversational analytics; and Tenfold, provider of a customer engagement platform for integrating voice and messaging communication systems with leading CRM and support services. With these technologies combined, companies can now offer natural, conversational consumer experiences that carry context and continuity across channels, powered through a single automated voice and messaging desktop experience.

Walter Bachtiger, cofounder and chief revenue officer of VoiceBase, at the time called LivePerson “a trail-blazing industry leader that shares our vision for improving conversations through actionable, AI-powered insights.”