No Jitter Roll: AI News from Slack, Otter.ai, Medallia and Conversica

Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week, we highlight: The arrival of Slack AI and its initial capabilities; Otter.ai’s new Meeting GenAI product; four new generative AI-powered features for Medallia’s platform; and a gen AI chat agent from Conversica. Also, SIPPIO launched fixed mobile convergence product SIPPIO Mobile in conjunction with its partner Tango Networks.

Slack AI Has Arrived

Slack began rolling out Slack AI on Valentine’s Day, 2024. The initial rollout includes three generative features:

• Search: Users can ask a question “conversationally” and if the user doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for, the AI will make “smart suggestions.”
• Channel Recaps: Users can generate highlights on any channels.
• Thread Summaries: Generates the “gist” of a long conversation. Sources are cited in each summary.

Slack conducted an internal analysis during the pilot and found that found that customers “could save an average of 97 minutes per user each week using Slack AI to find answers, distill knowledge and spark ideas.” The following screenshot is of Thread Summaries and is taken from the video embedded on Slack's site.

Source: Slack

Slack said that it does not share customer data with large language model (LLM) providers and does not use customer data to train those LLMs. Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds these security practices and compliance standards. Slack’s LLMs are hosted within Slack which helps ensure that customer data remains in-house.

Slack also indicated that its customers have built more than 13,400 AI custom internal Slack apps. Slack’s partner ecosystem is also integrating AI into Slack apps. A few examples include PagerDuty, Notion, Perplexity and Box.

Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for Enterprise plans (pricing was not published) and available in English. Additional plans and language support will be coming soon.

Otter.ai Launches Meeting GenAI

The AI-powered meeting assistant launched Meeting GenAI which allows users to tap into the summaries of past meetings regardless of the platform on which those meetings happened (e.g., Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion or Google Duet). So, when an Otter.ai Meeting GenAI user asks a question, Otter will search for answers across all the meetings to which it has access and then generate a response/summary.

Source: Otter.ai

Meeting GenAI also introduces AI Chat in Channels which enables team members to chat with each other and Otter AI Chat to generate answers and insights from channel discussions. AI Chat in Channels includes a multi-user generative AI paradigm so that teams can use Otter AI Chat together to answer questions and generate content collaboratively. Meeting GenAI also includes an AI-generated Conversation Summary View which allows action items to be automatically identified and tracked, along with assigned owners and deadlines.

Otter.ai offers all the new AI features in its plans including the free Otter Basic plan and $20/month/user Otter Business plan.

Medallia Launches Four New AI Features

The customer and employee experience solution provider launched four AI-powered solutions: Ask Athena, Intelligent Summaries, Smart Response, and Themes. These solutions will be available to Medallia customers as part of Medallia Experience Cloud.

• Ask Athena provides a conversational search function for users, using the context of the question to return an AI summarization of the results and additional data, graphs, charts, etc.
• Intelligent Summaries provides AI-powered summaries of interactions, profiles, issues, etc.
• Smart Response is a customer-facing solution that uses generative AI to assist employees in authoring contextually correct and personalized responses to customer inquiries. Users can edit the output of the model.
• Themes leverages Intelligent Summaries to track trends over time in reporting, KPIs, etc.

Conversica Releases Brand-Specific Large Language Models

The provider of conversational AI solutions for enterprise revenue teams has added contextual response generation to its Conversica Chat solution. Trained on customer-specific data, Conversica’s approach enables its LLMs to provide its customers with domain-specific and brand-safe responses.

SIPPIO Launches of SIPPIO Mobile

The voice enablement platform provider launched SIPPIO Mobile, powered by a partnership with Tango Networks. SIPPIO Mobile incorporates Tango’s fixed mobile convergence (FMC) technology Tango Extend to provide a unified communication experience across mobile and desktop devices. SIPPIO Mobile directly integrates mobile devices into a company’s communication system without using an app-based solution.

Source: SIPPIO

Want to know more?

As Metrigy principal analyst Irwin Lazar discusses, enterprise-grade FMC solutions are increasingly available. This article discusses the AT&T-Cisco partnership that created Webex Go, which is also a FMC offering. Tango Extend was announced in June 2023. Lastly, this article discusses the challenges associated with FMC products.

This Week on No Jitter

In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:

• AI and WEX Apps can help create an efficient digital workplace experience that right-sizes space and connects employees across various channels.
• AI may be creating the future of video.
• Using visual technology to transform CX.
• Drafting a useful data security plan involves following three broad guidelines.

Reserve Your Spot: Enterprise Connect 2024

Learn more about today’s most pressing enterprise communications and CX issues at Enterprise Connect, March 25-28, 2024, in Orlando, FL.