Espressive, the pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management (ESM), today announced availability of the Espressive Barista Control Center^™, the administrative interface to the intelligence behind Espressive Barista^™, the industry’s most comprehensive virtual agent solution. With the Barista Control Center, Espressive is empowering enterprises to expand Barista’s language model, design dynamic and interactive conversations, and integrate with virtually any API-enabled third-party system – all through a zero-code experience. Whether enterprises want a managed service, the flexibility to make their own updates, or the ability to do deep customizations on their own, Barista delivers.

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Up until now, enterprises only had two options when deploying workplace virtual agents; they had to choose between a toolkit approach that requires multiple tools, expensive resources, and long deployment times, or an out-of-the-box solution that could be deployed more rapidly but might lack in customization abilities. Barista fills that gap by accommodating a range of customer requirements all on one platform, without upgrades, as needs evolve.

“Enterprises are at different levels of maturity in leveraging conversational AI, and so it is important to have one platform that can grow with them without the requirement for an expensive upgrade when they are ready to do deep customization in house,” said Pat Calhoun, Espressive Founder and CEO. “We have beta tested the Control Center over several months with multiple customers and have seen exciting use cases. For example, a leading pharmaceutical company has integrated Barista into SAP ensuring users can get help from within the app, while Dexcom has expanded their language model to handle HR benefits and government programs that are only available in the Philippines.”

“In the first month after deploying Barista, we realized over 40% ticket deflection as Barista answered employee questions and resolved issues,” said Kumud Kalia, CIO, Guardant Health. “By automating fulfillment of routine requests our deflection has already grown to 57%. Automating application provisioning using the Integration Designer in the new Barista Control Center is giving us a clear path to the 70s.”

Espressive Barista Control Center – No-Code Customization

The Barista Control Center includes three key modules: the Language Expander, the Conversation Creator, and the Integration Designer delivering the following benefits:

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• Espressive Language Expander^™ Enables Customization to an Enterprise’s Language, Acronyms, and Culture
  The Language Expander enables analysts to easily extend Barista’s language model (i.e., understanding) to recognize and add new topics, with a full debugger to ensure customers understand how it is being handled by the underlying NLP engine. Customers can localize content so Barista will understand the language and acronyms of a given organization. Even the tone of conversations can be personalized to fit a company’s culture.

• Espressive Conversation Creator^™ Delivers Higher Deflection Through Conversations for Complex Issues
  When employees have complex issues, simply providing them with one or more knowledge articles is unlikely to result in a deflection. With Barista’s Conversation Creator, customers can create dynamic and interactive conversations as well as troubleshooting workflows to ensure complex issues can be deflected. Conversation Creator is also used to create interactive Barista Conversational Surveys.

• Espressive Integration Designer^™ Powers End-to-End Automated Workflows
  A very common use case for Barista is to automate work by connecting human language to automation. With Barista’s Integration Designer, customers can extend Barista’s reach to integrate with any RestAPI enabled third-party system to deliver an end-to-end automation workflow. The Integration Designer makes it easy for Espressive partners and customers to build integrations, which can then be made available via the Barista Integration Marketplace.

Robust Test Environment

The Control Center also incorporates a robust test environment enabling customers to manage content in sub-production environments for rigorous testing before pushing to production. Barista was designed to handle large enterprise environments, so every deployment comes with two instances: sub-production and production. Customers can manage content and integrations in their sub-production environment and rigorously test before pushing to production.

Barista’s fully-automated testing capability allows validation of changes against past interactions to easily highlight potential issues introduced by the changes. Enterprises are then able to troubleshoot and resolve matching issues before pushing new content into production, providing maximum flexibility with peace of mind.

Espressive Barista: A Paradigm Shift in the Delivery of AI-Based Employee Self-Help

Enterprises can deploy Espressive Barista in as little as six weeks with an ROI on day one because Barista comes with the Employee Language Cloud that recognizes over 2 billion phrases out of the box, gets smarter due to collective learning across the customer base, ingests knowledge articles, and provides answers to tens of thousands of topics across commercially available applications. Barista can also learn responses to topics by ingesting customers’ knowledge articles residing in a number of different systems (e.g., ITSM tool, Confluence, SharePoint). With Barista, enterprises can create, update, or retire FAQs on their own using the Barista FAQ Management Tool, an industry-first technology enabling subject matter experts across the enterprise to manage their own content.

Espressive Barista was designed as a continual improvement workstream, making Barista the only virtual agent that connects insights from analytics to the specific areas of content that need attention. It is also the only virtual agent that enables fast deployment, empowers subject matter experts to control their own destiny, and delivers a zero-code interface for extensive customization without any development effort.

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