Purple CTO Shares His Azure Communication Services Experience for a Secure Contact Center
In 2022, we knew legacy on-premise systems were not going to sustain us as a fully independent contact center solution for the dozens of customers we serve. At Purple, we needed a cloud-based solution that enabled us to deliver better customer support and engagement—and allowed us to stay competitive in the market. We looked at four options, but it was an easy decision for us: Azure Communication Services bridges the gap between outdated infrastructure and a secure, scalable platform, enabling our entire business to expand its services while ensuring data is securely managed and compliant with regulatory standards. How we transformed Purple’s technological base with Azure Communication Services Our previous investments in Microsoft Teams and Teams Direct Routing for PSTN connectivity aligned seamlessly with Azure Communication Service’s interoperable framework. By adopting ACS, we modernized our technological stack and expanded our service capabilities to include reception and delegation services. Azure Communication Service’s efficiency has allowed us to develop a cost-effective, reliable solution with minimal development effort while also addressing data storage and compliance requirements. Sensitive customer data is now stored securely within customers’ Azure tenants, enhancing security and regulatory compliance. Integrating AI for enhanced contact center capabilities The migration and integration processes presented logistical and technical challenges, particularly in transferring large volumes of PSTN minutes and seamlessly transitioning services for existing customers without disrupting their operations. But our team at Purple did a great job integrating ACS into client operations, which has bolstered our position in the contact center market. Leveraging ACS features—such as call automation, direct routing, job router, call recording, transcription, and media functionalities—we enhanced our communication capabilities to support chat, email, and SMS services. We also tap into several Microsoft AI technologies to improve our contact center capabilities. Services like speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), transcription, summarization, and sentiment analysis provide actionable insights for businesses and agents. For optimized performance, planned integrations with Copilot studio let managers and customers query specific contact center metrics, such as agent availability and peak interaction times. Flexibility and scalability translate to cost-effectiveness for customers With ACS’s flexibility and scalability, we've developed a business model centered around cost-effectiveness and reliability. Its pay-as-you-go structure supports unlimited agents and queues, charging customers based on usage, which has reduced our costs by up to 50% and improved stability by 83% compared to older solutions. At Purple, we offer granular billing that differentiates costs for VoIP minutes, call recordings, and transcriptions. Integration with platforms like Salesforce, Jira, and Dynamics365 further streamlines operations, and helps us deliver a seamless, high-quality, cost-effective experience for all of our clients. We are excited about the AI-driven collaboration with Microsoft, which enhances our voice, chat, and CRM integration services, delivering significant value to our customers. This partnership will optimize the end-user experience, seamlessly integrate existing customer data, and provide a more cost-effective solution for businesses to scale and elevate their customer interactions. - Purple Chief Technology Officer Tjeerd VerhoeffReliable, scalable, future-ready: AudioCodes extends the value of Teams for customer experiences with Azure Communication Services and Voca CIC
To improve customer experiences with cost-effective AI technology, AudioCodes fully onboarded their contact center from Microsoft Teams to Azure Communication Services.
Ignite 2024: Bidirectional real-time audio streaming with Azure Communication Services
Today at Microsoft Ignite, we are excited to announce the upcoming preview of bidirectional audio streaming for Azure Communication Services Call Automation SDK, which unlocks new possibilities for developers and businesses. This capability results in seamless, low-latency, real-time communication when integrated with services like Azure Open AI and the real-time voice APIs, significantly enhancing how businesses can build and deploy conversational AI solutions. With the advent of new AI technologies, companies are developing solutions to reduce customer wait times and improve the overall customer experience. To achieve this, many businesses are turning to AI-powered agents. These AI-based agents must be capable of having conversations with customers in a human-like manner while maintaining very low latencies to ensure smooth interactions. This is especially critical in the voice channel, where any delay can significantly impact the fluidity and natural feel of the conversation. With bidirectional streaming, businesses can now elevate their voice solutions to low-latency, human-like, interactive conversational AI agents. Our bidirectional streaming APIs enable developers to stream audio from an ongoing call on Azure Communication Services to their web server in real-time. On the server, powerful language models interpret the caller's query and stream the responses back to the caller. All this is accomplished while maintaining low latency, ensuring the caller feels like they are speaking to a human. One such example of this would be to take the audio streams and processing them through Azure Open AI’s real-time voice API and then streaming the responses back into the call. With the integration of bidirectional streaming into Azure Communication Services Call Automation SDK, developers have new tools to innovate: Leverage conversational AI Solutions: Develop sophisticated customer support virtual agents that can interact with customers in real-time, providing immediate responses and solutions. Personalized customer experiences: By harnessing real-time data, businesses can offer more personalized and dynamic customer interactions in real-time, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty. Reduce wait times for customers: By using bidirectional audio streams in combination with Large Language Models (LLMs) you can build virtual agents that can be the first point of contact for customers reducing the need for customers waiting for a human agent being available. Integrating with real-time voice-based Large Language Models (LLMs) With the advancements in voice based LLMs, developers want to take advantage of services like bidirectional streaming and send audio directly between the caller and the LLM. Today we’ll show you how you can start audio streaming through Azure Communication Services. Developers can start bidirectional streaming at the time of answering the call by providing the WebSocket URL. //Answer call with bidirectional streaming websocketUri = appBaseUrl.Replace("https", "wss") + "/ws"; var options = new AnswerCallOptions(incomingCallContext, callbackUri) { MediaStreamingOptions = new MediaStreamingOptions( transportUri: new Uri(websocketUri), contentType: MediaStreamingContent.Audio, audioChannelType: MediaStreamingAudioChannel.Mixed, startMediaStreaming: true) { EnableBidirectional = true, AudioFormat = AudioFormat.Pcm24KMono } }; At the same time, you should open your connection with Azure Open AI real-time voice API. Once the WebSocket connection is setup, Azure Communication Services starts streaming audio to your webserver. From there you can relay the audio to Azure Open AI voice and vice versa. Once the LLM reasons over the content provided in the audio it streams audio to your service which you can stream back into the Azure Communication Services call. (More information about how to set this up will be made available after Ignite) //Receiving streaming data from Azure Communication Services over websocket private async Task StartReceivingFromAcsMediaWebSocket() { if (m_webSocket == null) return; try { while (m_webSocket.State == WebSocketState.Open || m_webSocket.State == WebSocketState.Closed) { byte[] receiveBuffer = new byte[2048]; WebSocketReceiveResult receiveResult = await m_webSocket.ReceiveAsync(new ArraySegment<byte>(receiveBuffer), m_cts.Token); if (receiveResult.MessageType == WebSocketMessageType.Close) continue; var data = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(receiveBuffer).TrimEnd('\0'); if(StreamingData.Parse(data) is AudioData audioData) { using var ms = new MemoryStream(audioData.Data); await m_aiServiceHandler.SendAudioToExternalAI(ms); } } } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine($"Exception -> {ex}"); } } Streaming audio data back into Azure Communication Services //create and serialize streaming data private void ConvertToAcsAudioPacketAndForward( byte[] audioData ) { var audio = new OutStreamingData(MediaKind.AudioData) { AudioData = new AudioData(audioData) }; // Serialize the JSON object to a string string jsonString = System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize<OutStreamingData>(audio); // Queue the async operation for later execution try { m_channel.Writer.TryWrite(async () => await m_mediaStreaming.SendMessageAsync(data)); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine($"\"Exception received on ReceiveAudioForOutBound {ex}"); } } //Send encoded data over the websocket to Azure Communication Services public async Task SendMessageAsync(string message) { if (m_webSocket?.State == WebSocketState.Open) { byte[] jsonBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message); // Send the PCM audio chunk over WebSocket await m_webSocket.SendAsync(new ArraySegment<byte>(jsonBytes), WebSocketMessageType.Text, endOfMessage: true, CancellationToken.None); } } To reduce developer overhead when integrating with voice-based LLMs, Azure Communication Services supports a new sample rate of 24Khz, eliminating the need for developers to resample audio data and helping preserve audio quality in the process Next steps The SDK and documentation will be available in the next few weeks after this announcement, offering tools and information to integrate bidirectional streaming and utilize voice-based LLMs in your applications. Stay tuned and check our blog for updates!Anywhere365 integrates Azure Communication Services into their Dialogue Cloud Platform
Anywhere365 incorporates Azure Communication Services into its cloud contact center offering alongside integration with Microsoft Teams. The outcome of this helps businesses achieve more with AI-powered intelligent B2C communication solutions.Accelerate customer outcomes with Azure AI Services and Azure Communication Services
Learn how Azure Communication Services and Azure AI, and Azure Cognitive Search can be used to automate and transform your customer interactions with faster and informed human-centric responses across any communication channel.
Azure Communication Services technical documentation table of contents update
Technical documentation is like a map for using a platform—whether you're building services, solving problems, or learning new features, great documentation shows you the way to the solution you need. But what good is a map if it’s hard to read or confusing to follow? That’s why easy-to-navigate documentation is so important. It saves time, reduces frustration, and helps users focus on what they want to achieve. Azure Communication Services is a powerful platform, and powerful platforms require great documentation for both new and experienced developers. Our customers tell us consistently that our docs are a crucial part of their experience of using our platform. Some studies suggest that documentation and samples are the most important elements of a great developer experience. In this update, we’re excited to share how we’ve improved our technical documentation’s navigation to make it quicker and simpler than ever to find the information you need when you need it. Why did we change? In order for our content to be useful to you, it first needs to be findable. When we launched Azure Communication Services, the small number of articles on our site made it easy to navigate and find relevant content. As we’ve grown, though, our content became harder to find for users due to the quantity of articles they need to navigate. To refresh your memory, the table of contents on our docs site used to be structured with these base categories: Overview Quickstart Tutorials Samples Concepts Resources References These directory names describ e the type of content they contain. This structure is a very useful model for products with a clearly-defined set of use cases, where typically a customer’s job-to-be-done is more constrained, but it breaks down when used for complex, powerful platforms that support a broad range of use cases in the way that Azure Communication Services does. We tried a number of small-scale changes to address the problems people were having on our site, such as having certain directories default to open on page load, but as the site grew, we became concerned that our site navigation model was becoming confusing to users and having a negative impact on their experience with our product. We decided to test that hypothesis and consider different structures that might serve our content and our customers better. Our user research team interviewed 18 customers with varying levels of experience on our platform. The research uncovered several problems that customers were having with the way our docs navigation was structured. From confusing folder titles, to related topics being far away from each other in the nav model, to general confusion around what folder titles meant, to problems finding some of the most basic information about using our platform, and a host of other issues, our user research made it clear to us that we had a problem that we needed to fix for our users. What did we change in this release? To help address these issues, we made a few key changes to make our table of contents simpler and easier to navigate. The changes we made were strictly to site navigation, not page content, and they include: We've restructured the root-level navigation to be focused on communication modality and feature type, rather than content type, to better model our customers' jobs-to-be-done. Topics include All supported communication channels Horizontal features that span more than one channel Topics of special interest to our customers, like AI Basic needs, like troubleshooting and support This will allow customers to more easily find the content they need by focusing on the job they need to do, rather than on the content type. We've simplified the overview and fundamentals sections to make the site less overwhelming on first load. We've surfaced features that customers told us were difficult to find, such as UI Library, Teams interop, and Job router. We've organized the content within each directory to roughly follow a beginner->expert path to make content more linear, and to make it easier for a user to find the next step in completing their task. We've removed unnecessary layers in our nav, making content easier to find. We've added a link to pricing information to each primitive to address a common customer complaint, that pricing information is difficult to find and understand. We've combined quickstarts, samples, and tutorials into one directory per primitive, called "Samples and tutorials", to address a customer complaint that our category names were confusing. We added a directory to each primitive for Resources, to keep important information close by. We added root-level directories for Common Scenarios, Troubleshooting, and Help and support. We did a full pass across all TOC entries to ensure correct casing, and edited entries for readability and consistency with page content, as well as for length to adhere to Microsoft guidelines and improve readability. These changes have led us to a structure that we feel less taxing for the reader, especially on first visit, maps more closely to the customer’s mental model of the information by focusing on the job-to-be-done rather than content type, helps lead them through the content from easiest to hardest, helps make it easier for them to find the information they need when they need it, and helps remind them of all the different features we support. Here’s what the table of contents looks like on page load as of Feb 6: These changes are live now. You can see them on the Azure Communication Services Technical documentation site. What’s next: In the coming weeks we will continue to make refinements based on customer feedback and our assessment of usage metrics. Our content team will begin updating article content to improve readability and enhance learning. We will be monitoring our changes and seeking your feedback. How will we monitor the effectiveness of our changes? To track the effectiveness of our changes and to be sure we haven’t regressed, we’ll be tracking a few key metrics Bounce rates: We’ll be on the lookout for an increase in bounce rates, which would indicate that customers are frequently landing on pages that don’t meet their expectations. Page Views: We’ll be tracking the number of page views for our most-visited pages across different features. A decrease in page views for these pages will be an indicator that customers are not able to find pages that had previously been popular. Customer Interviews: We will be reaching out to some of you to get your impressions of the new structure of our content over the coming weeks. Customer Surveys: We've created a survey that you can use to give us your feedback. We'll also be adding this link to select pages to allow you to tell us what you think of our changes while you're using them! So, give our new site navigation a try, and please don’t hesitate to share your feedback either by filling out our survey or by sending an email to acs-docs-feedback@microsoft.com. We look forward to hearing from you! A
