Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.

• 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic 
• 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly

With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be  speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.  

To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

What is AI-powered Business Messages?

With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.

People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.

At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.

We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs. 

Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box

We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes. 

Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code. 

Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.

Finding success 

In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.

“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology

With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff.  With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.

We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat. 

Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages

Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it. 

To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started  and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.

Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection

Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve partnered with government organizations and academic institutions to serve communities at scale with Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI). I sat down with Bill MacKenzie, IT liaison for the Upper Grand School District in Ontario, and Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization, to discuss how they embraced CCAI to introduce scalable service delivery to residents and students alike. I’m sharing more on their stories below, and for the full overview, check out our Google Cloud Public Sector Summit session, Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection.

Upper Grand School District: Answering questions with speed and accuracy

Bill MacKenzie described the Upper Grand School District’s struggles at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly helping parents with IT issues. The staff-oriented help desk was not equipped to assist parents trying to securely login for students as young as kindergarten. Without sufficient support for parents, the District was struggling to handle thousands of phone calls a day.

To alleviate the manual strain, they turned to Quantiphi, a Google Cloud partner, to implement Google Cloud Dialogflow. They were fully functional within a few weeks. The new website provided real-time responses as well as clear documentation to help parents get up and running quickly.

“In the first 10 days, we had over 5,000 hits, and the accuracy rate was 92%,” MacKenzie said. 

The district doesn’t know what the future holds, but now that they have been through the process, they are confident they now understand how to create their own bots to meet critical needs.

City of Toronto: Getting critical information to the community

Marco Palermo explained how the city of Toronto was facing a very rapid and fluid situation at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information to constituents was extremely important, and they needed alternative channels to deliver that information.

Toronto has been committed to workforce equity and inclusivity in order to best represent the diversity of its residents. As a result, solutions had to be accessible to all. The bot handled 25,330 unique users and addressed 20,174 total questions with an 80% accurate response rate in the first four months. It’s been a huge success for the city, with plans to expand its capabilities.

Personalized response to the pandemic challenge

I noted that even before the pandemic, government leaders were asking for a way to provide more flexible personal experiences and better support outside of normal business hours. Around 60% of constituents want more self-service options and 75% would happily interact with digital resources if they could get the answers they needed.

Google Cloud CCAI  addresses these needs with a single core of intelligence that provides a consistently high-quality conversational experience—human or virtual—across all channels and platforms. It can be deployed on legacy infrastructure without upgrades in an average of two weeks.

CCAI operates with a conversational core that centralizes the ability to talk, understand, and interact, orchestrating high-quality conversations at scale. It provides services in three different ways:

• Virtual Agent AI allows natural conversation with customers to identify and address their issues effectively
• Agent Assist AI helps human agents by providing real-time turn-by-turn guidance so they can better serve constituents
• Insight AI determines metrics and trends in real-time to enable faster and more accurate insights

CCAI provides consistency across every application. It can go off-script when answering complex questions, adjusting human conversation with the capacity to handle unexpected stops and starts, odd word choices, or implied meanings. It can also handle multiple use cases for the customer, such as taking payments, updating information, providing information, and more. By allowing agencies to automate routine tasks and reduce the amount of time employees need to dedicate to answering calls, the solution created cost savings for the agency.

Explore more on this session by visiting the Public Sector Summit on-demand video.

Want to know the latest from Google Cloud? Find it here in one handy location. Check back regularly for our newest updates, announcements, resources, events, learning opportunities, and more. 

Tip: Not sure where to find what you’re looking for on the Google Cloud blog? Start here: Google Cloud blog 101: Full list of topics, links, and resources.

Week of May 24-May 28 2021

• Google Cloud for financial services: driving your transformation cloud journey–As we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’re sharing more on how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. Read more or watch the summit on demand.
• Introducing Datashare solution for financial services–We announced the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily. Read more.
• Announcing Datastream in Preview–Datastream, a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, allows enterprises to synchronize data across heterogeneous databases, storage systems, and applications reliably and with minimal latency to support real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures. Read more.
• Introducing Dataplex: An intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale–Dataplex provides a way to centrally manage, monitor, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools. Read more. 
• Announcing Dataflow Prime–Available in Preview in Q3 2021, Dataflow Prime is a new platform based on a serverless, no-ops, auto-tuning architecture built to bring unparalleled resource utilization and radical operational simplicity to big data processing. Dataflow Prime builds on Dataflow and brings new user benefits with innovations in resource utilization and distributed diagnostics. The new capabilities in Dataflow significantly reduce the time spent on infrastructure sizing and tuning tasks, as well as time spent diagnosing data freshness problems. Read more.
• Secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics with Analytics Hub–With Analytics Hub, available in Preview in Q3, organizations get a rich data ecosystem by publishing and subscribing to analytics-ready datasets; control and monitoring over how their data is being used; a self-service way to access valuable and trusted data assets; and an easy way to monetize their data assets without the overhead of building and managing the infrastructure. Read more.
• Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%–Coming soon to Preview, granular instance sizing in Spanner lets organizations run workloads at as low as 1/10th the cost of regular instances, equating to approximately $65/month. Read more.
• Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA and adds new security features for regulated industries–Bigtable instances with a multi-cluster routing policy across 3 or more regions are now covered by a 99.999% monthly uptime percentage under the new SLA. In addition, new Data Access audit logs can help determine whether sensitive customer information has been accessed in the event of a security incident, and if so, when, and by whom. Read more.
• Build a no-code journaling app–In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, Google Cloud’s no-code application development platform, AppSheet, demonstrates how you can build a journaling app complete with titles, time stamps, mood entries, and more. Learn how with this blog and video here.
• New features in Security Command Center—On May 24th, Security Command Center Premium launched the general availability of granular access controls at project- and folder-level and Center for Internet Security (CIS) 1.1 benchmarks for Google Cloud Platform Foundation. These new capabilities enable organizations to improve their security posture and efficiently manage risk for their Google Cloud environment. Learn more.
• Simplified API operations with AI–Google Cloud’s API management platform Apigee applies Google’s industry leading ML and AI to your API metadata. Understand how it works with anomaly detection here.
• This week: Data Cloud and Financial Services Summits–Our Google Cloud Summit series begins this week with the Data Cloud Summit on Wednesday May 26 (Global). At this half-day event, you’ll learn how leading companies like PayPal, Workday, Equifax, and many others are driving competitive differentiation using Google Cloud technologies to build their data clouds and transform data into value that drives innovation. The following day, Thursday May 27 (Global & EMEA) at the Financial Services Summit, discover how Google Cloud is helping financial institutions such as PayPal, Global Payments, HSBC, Credit Suisse, AXA Switzerland and more unlock new possibilities and accelerate business through innovation. Read more and explore the entire summit series.
• Announcing the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th–With a surge of new gamers and an increase in time spent playing games in the last year, it’s more important than ever for game developers to delight and engage players. To help developers with this opportunity, the games teams at Google are back to announce the return of the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th. Hear from experts across Google about new game solutions they’re building to make it easier for you to continue creating great games, connecting with players and scaling your business. Registration is free and open to all game developers. Register for the free online event at g.co/gamedevsummit to get more details in the coming weeks. We can’t wait to share our latest innovations with the developer community. Learn more.

As digital transformation continues apace, cloud native adoption has skyrocketed — and so has the volume, velocity, and variety of data that organizations must monitor to maintain visibility over their IT environments. Rather than a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) running a single application each, systems are more flexible and ephemeral — with thousands of containers and microservices emitting data — and services and systems have greater interdependencies. All of this has led to an explosion in complexity that makes it nearly impossible to reliably and efficiently operate cloud-native services using traditional observability solutions without dramatically increasing overhead. 

Built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Chronosphere is the only cloud-native observability solution that helps teams quickly resolve incidents before they affect the customer experience and the bottom line. And the relationship between Google Cloud and Chronosphere has developed into a growing partnership. Chronosphere brings the ability to rapidly and reliably control observability data and costs to Google Cloud customers, while maintaining open source compatibility. Recently, GV (Google Ventures) participated in Chronosphere’s $115 million round of Series C funding. Chronosphere is also available on Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easy for customers to procure and deploy.

Why Chronosphere chose to build on Google Cloud

Chronosphere’s founders, CEO, Martin Mao, and CTO, Rob Skillington, wanted to build an observability solution that solved some of the same problems they encountered when leading the observability team at Uber. The challenges at Uber focused on scale, reliability and cost, with a key emphasis on how these were not easily solvable for monitoring of cloud-native applications. Martin and Rob were looking to build a solution that was cloud-native, highly reliable, and capable of managing the high volume of data that modern organizations process every day. For those reasons, Martin and Rob chose to build Chronosphere on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): 

Cloud-native mindset: When Martin and Rob launched Chronosphere, one of the first considerations was this: A cloud-native problem needs a cloud-native solution. Google Cloud and Chronosphere work together to provide a purpose-built software-as-a-service (SaaS) observability solution platform for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Chronosphere runs much of its critical infrastructure on Google Cloud, using the service’s global infrastructure to deliver secure and reliable services to hypergrowth customers.  

Open platform: Martin and Rob have a commitment to openness — a commitment that Google Cloud makes to its customers as well. All of the ins and outs of Chronosphere are open source compatible –built on GKE, the platform  ingests both metric and trace data in a variety of open source formats, such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD, so teams can get onboard easily while avoiding vendor lock-in. And they remain fully in control of how much data to ingest, how it’s ingested, how it’s stored, and for how long. That way, customers remain in control of their observability costs while their systems and data continue to grow, and can troubleshoot and remediate issues more quickly. 

Mission-critical performance: Observability is a mission-critical service because it is essential for the reliability and performance of mission-critical systems. For this reason, Martin and Rob wanted to offer the strongest service level agreements (SLAs) possible for availability, reliability, and performance. Google Cloud provides the secure global infrastructure that allows them to do so. 

Data volume: Modern organizations emit huge volumes of data that they have to sift through in near-real time to gain full visibility. Google Cloud offers the same infrastructure and networks that Google uses to support billions of users every day, capable of processing petabytes of data with ease. 

How Chronosphere works with Google Cloud

GKE provides specific technical benefits that Chronosphere leverages to offer customers the performance and availability they need to spend less time managing their observability systems and more time creating value. 

The Chronosphere collector is a Kubernetes-native, Prometheus-compatible agent that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data, including metrics and traces. When you install the collector in a Kubernetes cluster, it automatically discovers all your workloads and starts to gather data from them. 

The Chronosphere UI tailors the experience to each user based on what services that individual owns or which teams that person belongs to. This makes the overall user experience friendlier and less overwhelming while helping people get to the bottom of issues faster.

Running on GKE means that Chronosphere can leverage Google Cloud’s multiple zones in each geographic region to distribute workloads evenly, ensure customer data stores are isolated from each other, and build tolerance for zonal failures. It also allows for data persistence across multiple zones. At the same time, Google Cloud’s global load balancers bring the data physically closer to the customer, shortening the time it takes for a data point to be visible to a user after its emission.

What this means for customers

The partnership brings together the best in cloud-native services and cloud-native observability. With the power of Google Cloud and Chronosphere, observability teams can transform their observability data based on need, context, and utility, storing only the useful data to reduce costs and improve performance. With purpose-built solutions for a cloud-native world, teams gain faster issue detection and resolution, and also benefit from Chronosphere’s 99.99% availability and open source compatibility — eliminating vendor lock-in. 

“Companies growing their online infrastructure risk huge hits to their bottom line if they don’t also manage increased complexity and cost,” says Martin. “Our partnership with Google Cloud brings together the world’s leading cloud services platform with our powerful observability solution to unlock the benefits of a cloud-native world, while optimizing for efficiency, reliability, and cost.”

Google Cloud and Chronosphere: The perfect match

Google Cloud and Chronosphere offer an industry-leading observability solution built from the ground up to abstract away the complexities of cloud computing for already stressed teams. And the future of this partnership is sure to bring new innovations around performance, reliability, and cost efficiency as both companies continue to invest in these three areas. The goal: to deliver the best performance for cost in the industry. 

Learn more about what Chronosphere and Google Cloud are doing for customers, and check out the Chronosphere listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Google Cloud Monitoring uptime checks in the Google Cloud mobile app. 

The uptime check capability offered by Cloud Monitoring is a simple yet powerful observability tool to monitor an application’s availability and performance on URLs provided by customers. The primary purpose of an uptime check is to track resource availability on an on-going basis. It’s essentially a pulse check for a system and is often the first to detect impending issues. Using uptime checks can proactively detect availability and latency issues with an application and reduce the time and severity your users are impacted by an outage. Uptime check can validate if the response code from your application is as expected, and also the latency of your service from different regions. Uptime checks can further inform your SLAs and SLOs, and track your service’s health over time. SREs at Google use uptime checks as an important part of their daily routine.

Given the critical role served by uptime checks, we heard your feedback on having the ability to track these checks in the Google Cloud mobile app. With this launch SRE’s, operators or administrators can do exactly that, in addition to easily accessing their cloud resources (App Engine, Compute, Databases, Storage), managing permissions using IAM, viewing logs, incidents, errors, and billing.

To access uptime checks, simply tap the “Operations” tab in the Google Cloud mobile app on your iOS or Android device.

After navigating to “Uptime Checks”, you will see a list of all the services you have previously added using the Create public uptime check documentation.

The list is sorted by status, so all failing checks are at the top. You can easily filter by status using the “Filters” option in the top-right corner of the screen.

Tapping any of the uptime checks will take you to the “details”-screen.

Here you’ll see your application’s uptime, latency, status per region (if you’re monitoring your application from more than one cloud region) and graphs to give you a sneak preview. The “passed check”-graph is showing how many checks passed in the last hour up to 6 weeks. You can easily change the interval using the scale above the graphs.

Scroll down the page to see more data. At the bottom of the screen, we’ve included some configuration details for this uptime check, so you can check the above data against this specific setting.

We hope you find this new uptime check feature useful in your daily work. To create new uptime checks, start here: Create public uptime check.

We’re working hard to make the Google Cloud app your companion for monitoring and managing your Google Cloud resources on the go.

For pricing information on uptime checks, please see the Cloud Monitoring pricing summary.

This new feature is available for you to use today. If you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you — just click the “Send feedback” button in the app. And if you don’t have the app – go ahead and download the app today from Google Play or the Apple App Store.