No Jitter Roll: Zoom Debuts AI Companion, Bandwidth Builds AIBridge with Partners, Genesys and Salesforce Team Up

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces.

This week, NJR highlights: Zoom's new generative AI Companion, which assists users with summaries and notes; Bandwidth builds AIBridge with partners Google and Cognigy to help enterprises transition from IVRs to conversational AI-base virtual agents; Genesys and Salesforce partner on an integrated product CX Cloud that incorporates many features from both platforms; and Otter.ai launches OtterPilot for Sales which provides transcription, summarization, and integration with Salesforce.

Zoom AI Companion Now Available with Paid Zoom Accounts

In a recent blog post, the UC and collaboration vendor announced its Zoom AI Companion which is a generative AI-powered assistant available now at no additional cost with the paid services in a Zoom user account.

Zoom AI Companion currently includes email composition assistance based on prompts, and in-progress and completed meeting summaries. After a meeting, AI Companion will automatically divide cloud recordings into smart chapters, highlight information, and create next steps for attendees to take action.

Over the latter months of 2023, Zoom will introduce additional functionalities such as email composition, chat summarization, detection of meeting intent in chat messages, the display of a scheduling button to streamline the process of meeting creation, and idea generation and categorization on a digital whiteboard. There is no timeline on when these features might be delivered.

All AI Companion capabilities are turned off by default; administrators and account owners can turn on all of its features or only some of them. Once those capabilities are enabled by the account owner or administrator, further controls are available for meeting hosts. For example, a meeting host might turn on AI Companion features for Zoom Meetings, such as summaries or in-meeting queries. If so, participants of that meeting will see in-product notices for the generative AI Companion capabilities that are in use.

• In late August 2023, Zoom announced Zoom Notes — a workspace for collaboration before, during and after Zoom Meetings.

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In the announcement, Zoom stated that it “does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models.” The company also linked to its commitment to responsible AI.

Zoom has a “federated” approach to AI in which it incorporates Zoom’s own large language model (LLM) while also supporting access to Meta’s Llama 2, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Bandwidth Launches AIBridge in Partnership with Google and Cognigy

Bandwidth partnered with Google and Cognigy to launch AIBridge, which enables enterprises to deploy voice-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools in front of their contact center. This solution helps “enables enterprises to make the transition from traditional IVR technologies to full-service conversational AI bot platforms,” John Bell, Bandwidth's Chief Product Officer.

With AIBridge, incoming calls to an enterprise contact center can first be routed directly to an AI-driven virtual agent, using a pre-built integration with Cognigy.AI and Google’s Dialogflow within Bandwidth's Maestro platform.

Genesys and Salesforce Launch AI-Powered CX and CRM Solution

The CCaaS and CRM platform providers have jointly introduced CX Cloud, a unified AI-powered customer experience and relationship management solution that integrates Genesys Cloud CX and Salesforce Service Cloud.

The joint solution leverages the Salesforce Data Cloud, which automatically aggregates real-time data to power AI solutions that enable more contextualized customer conversations and self-service bots. Via a no-code implementation and a single orchestration engine, businesses can design and deploy AI-powered, end-to-end customer journeys that fuse data, bots and channels from the Genesys and Salesforce platforms. The integration of Service Cloud and Cloud CX includes Salesforce’s Einstein AI and workforce engagement management (WEM) from Genesys.

Otter.ai Launches AI Assistant for Sales

The meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration application provider has launched OtterPilot for Sales. Some of the functionality includes:

• Auto-joining calls for transcription,
• Identifying and extracting insights from the calls, 
• Syncing with Salesforce,
• Using Otter AI Chat to answer questions about a call, write follow-up emails, summarize sentiment, 
• Maintaining centralized call notes in folders accessible to the sales team.

OtterPilot for Sales can be used via web or mobile apps. It launches first for enterprise customers.

This Week on No Jitter

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

• Google, Mio Team up for Chat Interoperability: With this team-up, Mio has recognized enterprises' need for interoperability among messaging platforms and positioned itself as a Rosetta stone of messaging.
• Mitel Keeps the DECT Innovation Train Running: The company's new handsets target different markets, from professional use in business and healthcare to more rigorous environments.
• Genesys and Salesforce Take Service Cloud Voice Integration To a New Level: The CCaaS and CRM powerhouses will use their partnership to allow companies to leverage the best that both companies have to offer in data management and AI while paring operational costs.
• A Roadmap for Selecting the Right CCaaS Vendor: The CCaaS market is highly competitive, and it can be overwhelming to choose among the options. Here's how to start assessing the cloud platforms.