Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecommunications service provider today announced that it has built an AI-based solution, in collaboration with NVIDIA which will improve the overall customer experience for all in-bound calls to its contact center. 

Airtel contact center operations are amongst the busiest in the world, servicing 360 million+ customers and handling over 100 million calls annually. Delivering high-quality experience to consumers remains the top priority. However, at this scale, manual solutions to audit the contact center agents was a challenge.

Today, Airtel runs automated speech recognition algorithm on 84% of its calls coming into its contact centers. This helps Airtel identify areas of improvement for the agent when they interact with the consumers, leading to better customer experience. For example, if an agent keeps a consumer on hold for a long time, Airtel would be able to detect this and make necessary corrections to reduce hold time. Delivering these insights at the scale of Airtel is typically very expensive due to the heavy compute requirements. 

The technology that enables this is the automated speech recognition. In order to develop this specialized speech application, Airtel leveraged the NVIDIANeMo conversational AI toolkit and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, a multi-framework inference serving software, supported in the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. NVIDIA’s advanced software and Airtel’s deep learning-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models allow Airtel to accurately interpret language and make practical changes to its operations to serve agents and consumers better, delivering output at 30% of the typical computing cost. This technology also runs on a much lower carbon footprint making it better for the environment through lower Green House Gas (GHG) emissions.

Speaking about the engagement, Adarsh Nair, CEO of Airtel Digital, said: “We are thrilled to be working with NVIDIA to build cutting-edge solutions that allow us to serve our customers better. AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we do business, and we are confident that this shall help us push the boundaries of innovation in the industry.”