Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week: Zoom introduces new features to its Contact Center Suite and details three price tiers for its CX offering. CommBox launches its GPT 3.5 Turbo-powered Era AI for contact centers while NEC adds an AI Assistant to its UNIVERGE CONNECT (unified communications) and ENGAGE (contact center). Accenture debuts new services intended to help enterprises trial and compare Gen AI models, and Google launches the Gemini LLM, its newest model family. Finally, and HPE and Nvidia collaborate to bring out-of-the-box LLMs to enterprises.
In the coming weeks, Zoom Contact Center will be available in new tiered plans:
Zoom AI Expert Assist can retrieve and suggest the responses from a curated set of knowledge bases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other systems of record. It can assist both agents and supervisors. Additional functionality expected in early 2024 includes recommended next best action, complete with personalized steps, and an intelligent view of agents and activity for supervisors and contact center leaders.
Other enhancements to Zoom’s CX products include:
Finally, Zoom launched the standalone Zoom Surveys product on November 29, 2023. It allows users to build, edit, and share surveys and polls during or after meetings, webinars, or via a link. Surveys is integrated into the Zoom client.
The customer communications solution provider launched Era AI, based on its proprietary technology and OpenAI’s GPT 3.5-Turbo large language model (LLM). Era AI’s can be grounded in a company’s resource base (e.g., support, help and knowledge articles, website content). It will then use those datasets to power a chatbot. Era AI provides a no-code tool for building those chatbots. The platform also provides sentiment analysis, which can be used to reroute calls, identify customer intent, and standardize the “manner and tone of written responses” to keep them in line with brand guidelines. Era AI also provides agent assist capabilities.
According to Dvir Hoffman, Chief Product Officer at CommBox, “It may seem simple on paper but going from solely reliant on humans to 80% automation and 20% human is a huge transformation the majority of brands are still trying to navigate.”
The provider and integrator of IT, communications and networking solutions introduced the UNIVERGE BLUE AI Assistant powered by UNIVERGE BLUE PULSE AI which is NEC’s a cloud-based AI platform. UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT is NEC’s cloud-based unified communications and collaboration platform. NEC said that the UNIVERGE BLUE PULSE artificial intelligence solution is designed to be able to easily change out third party generative AI engines so it can “always use [a] best of breed” model.
NEC’s new AI Assistant is integrated throughout the company’s CONNECT and ENGAGE (NEC’s contact center) products. It provides transcription (automatic, non-real time), transcription redaction (of sensitive/private data), sentiment analysis, analysis of recorded conversations to identify key topics, tasks, follow-up actions and, coming soon, automatic summarization.
Built into the CONNECT desktop and mobile applications, the NEC Blue AI Assistant is available for free for UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT users, including ESSENTIALS, PRO, PRO PLUS, and CONNECT BRIDGE PRO and PRO-PLUS users. NEC notes further that the AI Assistant does not store any personal/company data in the generative AI engine nor is that data sent externally for purposes of further training the AI engine.
Aimed at enterprises that are evaluating generative AI solutions, the professional services company launched a set of services that include:
"Companies that want to harness the power of generative AI will need an array of specialized models,” said Karthik Narain, group chief executive, Accenture Technology. “Our switchboard is designed to enable companies to do this at scale while managing costs and carbon footprint, aligning the right models to the business context.”
Google introduced Gemini 1.0, its multimodal LLM that can recognize, understand and combine different information formats including text, code, audio, image and video. There are three model sizes that are built to scale from on-device implementations (Gemini Nano) to Gemini Ultra, the largest model designed for highly complex tasks (e.g., coding, math questions).
Google Bard now uses a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro; Gemini likely replaced Google’s current primary LLM, PaLM, and LaMDA (PaLM’s predecessor). In the coming months, Gemini will be available in more Google products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI. Duet AI is Google’s AI assistant in Google Cloud and Workspace (Sheets, Docs, etc.).
This Google DeepMind whitepaper details the capabilities and tasks that each version of Gemini (Nano, Pro and Ultra) can perform. The paper compares Gemini’s performance to other LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, etc.). This Gemini site provides some video discussion of the new family of models and how each perform.
HPE and Nvidia built a co-engineered, pre-configured AI tuning and inferencing solution intended to help enterprises use pretrained foundation models with organization-specific private data to create production applications such as AI chatbots. This solution integrates HPE Machine Learning Development Environment Software, HPE Ezmeral Software, HPE ProLiant Compute and HPE Cray Supercomputers with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, including the NVIDIA NeMo framework.
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