Azure Communication Services making AI Speech and Job Router Generally Available this year

Announced at Microsoft Ignite, the Azure Communication Services team are bringing two important and powerful features to GA this year:

Azure AI Speech, which is integrated into Call Automation flow allows developers to perform both Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text recognition in the context of incoming or outgoing voice calls, which can also be tied to PSTN phone numbers. Developers can configure their code to either recognise one of a set of phrases, or accept free-form text.

I’ve used this whilst it’s been in preview to great effect, by configuring my code to recognise free-form text, then sending that text to a GPT model that’s been grounded in specific data, thus making a phone line assistant that does a pretty good job of answering questions! (by the way, if you want to see a real-world demo of this, check out my talk in a few weeks in Amsterdam).

Azure AI Speech will be made generally available later this month.

Job Router is the other capability that is going GA this year. This is something that’s been in preview for quite some time and helps abstract the routing issue associated with assigning jobs to resources. The most common and applicable example is assigning calls to agents in a contact center environment, but Job Router could be used for other things as well. I’ve built contact center solutions using the capability and can report that it’s a really nice abstraction to have and means not having to worry about coding (and then testing) the business logic of the routing.

Job Router will be generally available in early December.

Watch the Ignite video about this announcement: Transform customer experiences with AI-assisted voice, video and chat

For more information, see the announcement blog post.