At its recent Interactions customer and partner event in New York City, NICE made several announcements, not all of which made the main stage keynotes or press releases. At the event, I learned about its plan to democratize transcription by expanding the free tier of its ElevateAI service.
I learned about it directly from Neeraj Verma, the GM of the ElevateAI service at NICE, during the Interactions conference. You can watch our discussion here, or read on for more information.
NICE has launched an expanded freemium version of ElevateAI, its low-cost AI solution to transcribe contact center interactions.
The company initially announced the product in September of 2022, and has now significantly expanded its freemium tier. This change will allow many more contact centers and even other types of organizations to access NICE’s transcription service.
The freemium version enables NICE to expand into previously untapped markets.
“It’s an interesting new market entry for NICE,” said Neeraj Verma, who runs ElevateAI for NICE. “It allows customers from all over the world to use NICE’s amazing technology without having to buy NICE products. Transcription is a starting point for improved customer service.” ElevateAI offers an easy-to-use interface that allows users to upload content for transcription.
It appears to be a truly free service. I was wondering if the hidden cost of ElevateAI was something like NICE retaining the data for ongoing training, but it’s not there. NICE does not plan to use ElevateAI users' data in any way other than in the core transcription service.
It appears that NICE sees ElevateAI as an opportunity to build its pipeline: help smaller customers today for free, with the hopes of winning future business when they grow. “There is no catch,” Verma stated, “We’re offering this to contact centers to get started.”
The service is not tied to a specific vendor, or file format (in fact, ElevateAI supports 140 different file formats). “The great thing is that you can be on Verint technology or Genesys technology, and you can very easily use ElevateAI to bring amazing CX models to your contact center for free,” Verma said.
Not all transcription services are alike. They are usually optimized for different use cases. ElevateAI is optimized for customer service, but it can be used for other types of transcriptions too such as meetings, podcasts, speeches, or whatever else you want to throw at it.
According to NICE, today’s users of ElevateAI are using it to:
On the freemium plan, customers can conduct up to 1,000 interactions a day, and have access to a single API. There are also two paid versions of the product, with each offering:
The prepaid version has a fixed pricing structure. The pay-as-you-go version offers tiered pricing. Companies can sign up for ElevateAI with a single click on the NICE website.
“The cool thing about ElevateAI is that NICE has been a powerhouse in the CX industry for 20-plus years, and we have been developing our own transaction technologies for that long,” Verma said. “We’ve concentrated our efforts on developing the best transcription and AI CX engine in the industry.
In addition to transcription, ElevateAI offers pre-built models designed to understand sentiment, behavior, and interactions between customers and employees.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz.
