Welcome to the customer experiences with Contact Center AI Course. I'm Barbara Slaughter and I'm the Technical Curriculum Developer for this course. An incredible team of Contact Center AI Solutions, architects and education professionals contributed their expertise for this course, some of whom you'll get to hear from as we go through the modules. Research shows that customers continue to want to talk to someone when they need to interact with your company. Billions of calls are handled by agents annually, and millions of agents are employed globally. The contact centre industry is one that continues to grow, and to experience the challenges associated with that growth. For example, recruiting and retaining staff while giving efficient service that delights the customer. What if a computer could manage most of the high volume, easy to handle calls, leaving higher value, more difficult calls to human agents? Technological advances in speech to text, text to speech and natural language understanding make it possible to automate the customer agent interaction. This is not the Old World of Press one for sales or press two for support. I'm talking about a true machine to person conversation in which the human may not even realize they're talking to a computer generated virtual agent. And if the virtual agent cannot help with something, it is intelligent enough to recognize that it needs help and can hand the call off to a human agent. Google is at the forefront of this technological revolution, combining many of its innovative technologies into one contact Center AI Suite. This is the subject of this course. In this course, you will get handson- practice on designing, building and improving, engaging customer experiences, using Googles Contact Center AI. We start off by using dialogue flows building blocks, to create a virtual agent by defining user intents, extracting potential entities, maintaining the context of the conversation. And being able to perform fulfillment actions outside of dialogue flow. For example, storing data pieces from the conversation into a database. We discuss a number of themes that are important when you want to take your virtual agent to production. Like being able to add basic authentication, deploying fulfillment, code on scalable, serverless architecture, and leveraging existing sources to automate parts of the agent building process. We also talk about how to integrate your virtual agent into other channels, dialogue flow Telephony Gateway is one example. And also touch on a few other additional functionalities that can make your agent smarter and even more engaging. Let's dive in.