Supporting AWS Lambda Provides Real Solutions for Bright Pattern Customers

If you missed the webinar, it’s available here to watch

Recently a customer required voice recognition from a third party for their call center. We needed the ability to interact with other code or services, quickly and easily. This was an excellent opportunity to leverage AWS Lambda from inside of a Bright Pattern scenario, and shows why the latest release includes support for the Amazon service.

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Lambda is a web service that runs user code on demand with few other concerns. It is serverless, event driven, supports multiple languages, and is highly scalable. Cloud based means the user is free from managing servers, and AWS takes on the responsibility of maintaining hosts for the code to run on. Additionally, Lambda is event driven, and bills only for execution time. Several languages are natively supported, and a custom runtime API available for others, giving the service maximum flexibility for users.

The customer now had all the necessary pieces for a solution. Bright Pattern would handle an incoming call in a scenario. A client records a known phrase and the audio is encoded to a string. The string is passed to AWS Lambda to decode and upload to VoiceIt and receive verification. The results are sent back to Bright Pattern in JSON format, and the scenario continues.

This solution leveraged existing software to increase functionality, without requiring the cost of additional infrastructure or management.

The important role AWS Lambda filled was more than just a middle layer of passing data and managing connections. There were two critical steps that required a language like python:

  1. the data was base64 encoded, and it needed to be decoded prior to sending

  2. VoiceIt required the data to be uploaded from a file location, so it had to be stored to a temporary location. Data transformation and writing to files is easy enough to do in python in a few lines of reliable, tested code.

This was also a very affordable solution. By calculating the cost per ms with the average run time of the methods, we could verify 100,000 voices for $1 on Lambda. Providing support for AWS Lambda in Bright Pattern Contact Center administrator extended the functionality of voice scenarios to include voice verification. The solution was affordable, and highly scalable, and provided as an event driven service. For a guided walkthrough of how a simple demo can be done, read part two.