Sopra Steria chose IBM watsonx Assistant, IBM Watson Language Translator, IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding and IBM Watson Text to Speech solutions as the AI foundation for its intelligent virtual assistant accelerator engine. Most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, which can frustrate users when a misunderstanding arises. IBM watsonx Assistant technology is trusted by thousands of businesses because it knows when to provide an answer, when to ask for clarification and when to direct the question to a human agent. The Watson Language Translator solution helps to translate foreign languages, while the Watson Natural Language Understanding offering supports the extraction of complex information from the query. Watson Text to Speech technology works with the IBM watsonx Assistant solution by converting written text into natural-sounding audio in a variety of languages and tones.
To accelerate deployment across a range of customer industries and environments, Sopra Steria enhanced the IBM watsonx Assistant technology. “Our solution can be deployed much faster than IBM watsonx Assistant or any other AI chatbot or virtual assistant on the market,” comments Meyer. “We created a very intuitive graphical user interface, so once we set up the system and do some training, users can start creating dialogs immediately. When potential clients see it for the first time, they get very excited because it’s so simple to use.”
Sopra Steria also added an orchestrator and a front-end interface to manage dialogs, established connectivity to external systems and brought in save and restore features and machine translation. “Most of our users speak French and English, so the same dialog has to be available in both languages,” says Meyer. “And we have special requests. For example, tourism and police departments need us to support Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, English and French to accommodate visitors. So we added a translation engine to the system that translates inquiries into English to be processed by IBM watsonx Assistant and then translates the responses back into the user’s native language.”
The intelligent virtual assistant accelerator engine runs on IBM Cloud® and can also run on premises at customer locations. “Locating the solution on premises allows us to easily connect the dialogs with the client’s internal systems like billing, human resources and information management. Even if the solution is completely on premises, it can be accessed anywhere because it’s multicloud, both private and public,” adds Meyer.
Sopra Steria uses Red Hat® OpenShift® (link resides outside of ibm.com) technology to build and deploy applications for the company’s employees. This leading multicloud Kubernetes platform offers automated installation, upgrades and lifecycle management throughout the container stack on any cloud. The Red Hat OpenShift platform empowers developers by offering innovative tools and applications along with sandbox environments to experiment and test new concepts. And the solution’s automated provisioning, management and scaling of applications free Sopra Steria’s developers to focus on writing code for groundbreaking solutions like the company’s virtual assistant.
To support the instances of its intelligent virtual assistant solution and other managed services, Sopra Steria can use Red Hat OpenShift technology to provide automated, around-the-clock assistance, incident resolution, rapid deployment and enterprise-grade, security-rich features.