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Einstein Bot, Einstein Voice create new Salesforce channels Posted on : Dec 12 - 2018

 

Born to compete with IBM's Watson, the Einstein cloud AI is in its third year of life and is exhibiting all the traits of a typical 3-year-old.

Einstein Bot and Einstein Voice are here, and they represent growth milestones for the 3-year-old suite of Salesforce AI features named after the genius physicist.

Einstein -- the Salesforce AI, not the physicist -- was born a little over three years ago in the basement of a furniture store on University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif.

It was the brainchild of a small team of Salesforce AI enthusiasts who, like many tech entrepreneurs before them, felt that a "back-to-the-garage" approach would fuel innovation. It was there that they created an AI to rival IBM's mammoth Watson.

Now 3 years old, Einstein has proven himself to be as much a prodigy as his namesake.

Growing up fast

Einstein progressed with phenomenal speed after its introduction to the world in 2016. Serving a population of more than 3 million users, its daily number of operations is already in excess of 1 billion.

Some notable features include Einstein Sentiment, which can identify emotion in email and text; Einstein Intent, which can sort through customer inquiries and generate relevant responses to specific problems; and Einstein Object Detection, which can pick out unique objects in images. That's over and above Einstein Analytics, the core functionality it put forth to initially challenge Watson.

A desire to please

The 3-year-old Einstein has a desire to please. The first Salesforce AI tool, originally dubbed Optimus Prime, was a "What's next?" tool for organizing sales work. The Einstein Intelligence module was a people-pleasing timesaver that sorts a salesperson's leads by "most likely to close," along with the ability to sort email lists by those recipients most likely to open an email.

The buildup of features and apps since has followed this pattern -- to not only generate insights and predictions, bolstering efficiency holistically across CRM systems, but to provide personal labor-saving functionality to individuals.

Learning to talk

Einstein likes to talk. This feature of AI is now widely used, thanks to Siri and Alexa, but Einstein, per Salesforce's promises, is talking to users, not at them. Its core natural language processing capability springs from a powerful general model that enables an array of NLP functions -- including Q&A, inference, goal-oriented dialogue and summarization -- available to developers for faster and more efficient exploitation.

More impressive still is Einstein Voice, now in beta, which empowers users to talk to Einstein apps on their mobile devices, with Einstein parsing verbal instructions to retrieve and process relevant records and tasks. View More