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Introduction to Aura Virtual Assistant
Discover in this document the fundamentals and advantages of Aura Virtual Assistant
What is Aura Virtual Assistant?
Aura Virtual Assistant is the new relationship with our clients. A cutting-edge digital assistant accessible through different channels, brands and devices, that understands our customers’ needs expressed in natural language and offers personalized responses in real time.
Figure 1. Aura Virtual Assistant
Aura Virtual Assistant is able to:
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Talk and establish conversations with the users, as it is based on a conversational design to provide a natural experience through several channels and using different brands
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Understand and recognize the user’s requests: Leveraging Cognitive Services, Aura Virtual Assistant offers natural language processing capabilities for an accurate communication with the customers, depending on channel capabilities and usability criteria.
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Resolve: Aura Virtual Assistant builds the logic of different types of experiences and provides precise answers to our customers in real time.
Key Aura Virtual Assistant features
Aura Virtual Assistant is designed as a distributed ecosystem, within an architecture evolution at the forefront of the latest advances in software architecture.
In this framework, it is conceived as a multi-bot system based on Microsoft skills architecture, that offers the following capabilities:
Multichannel, as it can be integrated into different channels, both third-party and Telefónica ones.
Multibrand, as within an OB, it can be accessible through diverse brands, each of them with different channels and use cases
Multi-communication mode, allowing text, voice or tap-based interaction through different devices.
It enables and accelerates the creation and integration of skills-bots across channels, for Telefónica users to manage their digital services and deliver rich experiences, while ensuring data privacy and security.
It has a specific personality and tone, consistent through channels.
It includes a set of use cases and prebuilt bots (as the video one).
It offers a series of capabilities and tools to create locally relevant experiences for the user.
It enables the connection with ATRIA for leveraging cutting-edge AI capabilities.
It broadens the spectrum of technologies that can be connected to Aura.
Aura Virtual Assistant functional overview
The following diagram shows how Aura Virtual Assistant operates and its communication flow at a high level:
Figure 2. Aura Virtual Assistant functional overview
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The user accesses Aura through one of the brands through which the OB commercializes its services.
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The user sends a request to Aura through a specific channel available for the selected brand, which is the communication mean a Telefónica client must use to interact with Aura.
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Then, Aura Root component, which is the core block of Aura Virtual Assistant functionalities, receives the request and redirects it to the best skill to answer it.
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This skill, which is a bot with specific expertise and features, understands the request and resolves it. If required, it retrieves data from Kernel.
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Aura Root provides the response back to the user through the intended channel.
Discover more details of Aura Virtual Assistant functional operation and its functional components in the document Aura Virtual Assistant functional description.
Are you a highly-skilled technician? Access here technical documents related to Aura Virtual Assistant:
- Aura Virtual Assistant development architecture and operation
- Aura Virtual Assistant technical components
- Aura Virtual Assistant technical guidelines
Benefits from using Aura Virtual Assistant
Benefits for Aura end-users
| Key advantages | Enhancements for Aura |
|---|---|
| Easier relationship | Aura Virtual Assistant enhances customer relationships and improves business automation, efficiency, and transversal intelligence within the digital ecosystem. |
| Improved user’s experience | Aura can easily integrate cutting-edge AI technologies to improve Aura capabilities, thus offering a wider range of experiences together with more accurate and enriched responses to the users, while ensuring data privacy and security. |
| Consistency | The user will always have the same experience regardless of the channel she is using, as there will not be different use cases depending on the channel |
| Ready for future challenges | The quick and easy integration of technologies broadens the capabilities of Aura, that can take advantage of state-of-the-art solutions from different partners to be connected to Aura |
Benefits for Aura IT Teams
| Key advantages | Enhancements for Aura |
|---|---|
| Efficiency | Multibot architecture can perform tasks more efficiently due to the skills isolation. Each skill can be deployed and work independently, leading to better overall performance and resources utilization. |
| Scalability and flexibility | The separation of Aura functionalities (logic, training, routing, deployment, etc.) allows a cost and time-effective strategy for extending Aura capabilities without affecting other components |
| Autonomy | The new architecture allows an easy integration of multivendor development tools (such as Microsoft Composer, Teneo), third-party bots or innovative cognitive components (for example, KSolr, MSFT Language Studio, Azure OpenAI models). |
| Deployment simplification | The separation of Aura into different functional blocks and the skills isolation facilitate the installation, as only the specific component/feature to be deployed is affected, without the need for global re-deployments |
| Resilience | Multibot architecture improves fault-tolerance. If a single component fails, the whole system can continue functioning |
| Enrichment mechanisms | Aura can incorporate tools able to add additional information both to the user’s request (better resolution) and to the response (relevant information for the user) through the integration of Advanced Analytics Models (AAMs) and contextual information |