AI Suggeston

[ThePhoneMan]

We have a client who have advised they spend a lot of time having agents on hold listening to 3rd party hold music. They would like to know if 3CX can offer a feature whereby artificial intelligence can monitor the call and listen for when the hold music of the third-party changes to somebody answering the phone and then reconnects them to the call to continue the conversation. It would save them hundreds of hours per week.

We advised that we could see the merit in this feature and that we would ask the question as to whether this is a feature that could be developed or is in the road map for the future.

Is this the right place to suggest?

 

[KyriacosS_3CX]

Hi,

Ideas forum https://www.3cx.com/community/forums/other-ideas/ would probably be best.

 

[ThePhoneMan]

Hi,

Even when logged in on that board it shows: You have insufficient privileges to post threads here.

 

[KyriacosS_3CX]

Yes, you are right - that forum has a level limit before allowing posts. For now you can leave this suggestion here, or if you can get in touch with a higher level partner that would like to see this suggestion happen too, they can post it instead.

 

[Alphabetic]

Tricky one really.. what scenario are your callers in long queues for?
what happens when you make this call, get queued, AI takes over, you forget, disappear, go for lunch and then they're waiting for you? a good idea in theory but I imagine it would be impractical sometimes. what happens if youre on a call when they answer? or do you suggest the person sits and waits for AI to hand back? well in that case they might as well sit and wait on the phone. How do you handle having multiple calls with AI waiting for them to answer?

If it helps.. most places offer types of music to listen to

 

[VoIPTools]

The first challenge is getting access to the phone call audio stream. The second challenge is the AI cost for streaming the audio to AI so it can make the determination when the call is picked up off hold.

I've not found a 3CX supported way of easily streaming the audio of a phone call to AI. It is possible to do, and we have a solution, but I think you will likely run into a cost problem. It is not going to be inexpensive, and obviously the longer the call is on hold, the more expensive it is going to be.

Using AI to make this determination is going to be required because the queue could barge into the call to let the caller know their position in the queue and the average hold time, etc., so only AI is going to be able to know the difference between a queue update, and a person picking up the call.

I can say with a degree of confidence that it can be done, but the AI costs are probably going to be prohibitive if you have a large number of calls. But I'm putting words in your mouth. Let's take an example. I'm going to guess that the cost of converting voice to text is similar to taking the audio stream and interpreting what is being said. For a 30-minute phone call, voice-to-text is between 15-20 cents unless you host your own LLM (which is an option). Do the math and consider whether it makes sense to pursue the effort. If it is, we can help.