New Delhi, India – 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 centre.

Airtel contact centre operations are amongst the busiest in the world, servicing 360 million+ customers and handling 100 million+ calls annually. Delivering a high quality experience to consumers is a critical priority. However, at this scale, manual solutions to audit the contact centre agents did not deliver.

Today, Airtel runs automated speech recognition algorithm on 84% of its calls coming into its contact centre. 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 automated speech recognition. In order to develop this specialised 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 revolutionise the way we do business, and we are confident that this shall help us push the boundaries of innovation in the industry."

“AI-powered speech analytics is helping human agents improve customer service and satisfaction,” said Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director of South Asia at NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA AI software, Airtel is boosting call centre operations while growing efficiency and saving costs.”

Airtel considers its collaboration with NVIDIA an exciting step forward in the use of AI in the telecommunications industry, one that shall have a significant impact on the way companies leverage technology to serve customers. Airtel is aggressively pursuing next-generation technologies such as AI and ML across multiple facets of its operations. For example, AI and ML is currently being leveraged in the network teams for efficient deployment of towers and in the Wynk music service to drive personalisation.