This blog describes the differences between Cisco Answer Service and Expertflow Hybrid Chat.

Cisco’s Answer Service is providing links to relevant answers or articles to contact center agents during a call or chat sessions with a customer, in the form of a Finesse Answers Gadget.
It does this by using Google’s Dialogflow AI technology to extract Intents and Entities from speech or from written chat messages, and matching these to relevant answers.

This approach is very similar to Expertflow’s Hybrid Chat and Customer Interaction solution that was launched in 2018.

Hybrid Chat and Customer Interactions (HC) provides the following capabilities that are currently not available with Answer Services:

• HC can work with any AI service, any chatbot and in any language and is not limited to Google Dialogflow. It can also work with Google Dialogflow, for which Expertflow won a global award by Cisco and Google in 2018. Out-of-the-box connectors other than Google Dialogflow exist for IBM Watson, Microsoft LUIS or rasa.ai.
• It can run entirely on-premise, so no customer data leaves the company’s premises.
• It works both on CCE and on CCX (Answer Service for chat only works with CCX Socialminer Chat, not for CCE)
• HC is able to auto-answer in chat, if and when the confidence score of the AI engine is high. This offloads agents in all standard situations, without requiring the agent to take any manual action. Human agents are only required if and when the AI engine is stuck.
• HC can integrate with any external third-party knowledge base/ article collection (such as Sharepoint or others).
• HC can embed also in environments where Finesse is not the agent front-end, for example, a CRM connector.

Like Answer Service, Hybridchat can work…

• with Google Dialogflow
• alongside Socialminer Chat
• …be used for voice – if an ASR (speech recognition engine) is added to the solution.

Differences between Hybrid Chat and Socialminer Chat or ECE Chat are mentioned in this blog.