No Jitter Roll: AI Assistance for UC, Voice Analytics

This week we share announcements around conversational AI, a 4G deskphone, speech technologies, a wireless speakerphone, and communications-infused content collaboration.

 

Coincident with Enterprise Connect 2021, held virtually from Sept. 27-29, Vonage debuted AI Virtual Assistant for its Vonage Business Communications (VBC) platform for voice, messaging, and video. Vonage has been offering this capability on its contact center platform since May 2020.

 

AI Virtual Assistant for VBC enables businesses to create voice-enabled self-service using a no-code drag-and-drop tool. This capability will be suitable for smaller companies that don’t have a contact center platform but do use VBC for UC and want to provide contact center-like services for their customers, Savinay Berry, EVP of product and engineering at Vonage, said during a No Jitter briefing. “Why not democratize those services?”

 

For example, a small furniture store could allow customers to place and check on order status, Berry said. Behind the scenes, AI Virtual Assistant connects the different workflows and enables the customer “to feel like they’ve contacted a professional business,” he said. “At the end of the day, [businesses] are reducing the amount of time it takes for [them] to work with their customers at scale,” Berry added.

 

Vonage also announced this week that Vonage Contact Center is Chrome Enterprise Recommended by Google. IT and contact center administrators using Chrome OS devices can leverage Vonage's full suite of contact center capabilities, Berry said.

 

Verizon Business and Yealink revealed the One Talk T67LTE, a wireless deskphone with 4G/LTE and Wi-Fi support. For use with Verizon’s One Talk mobile business service, this Android-based phone features a seven-inch color touchscreen and can use Verizon's cellular network in cases of Internet outages, Verizon Business said. One Talk T67LTE is set for GA by the end of 2021, Verizon Business said.

 

Conversation analytics provider CallMiner announced that its Eureka Platform is now available to Azure customers, allowing them to integrate Eureka with Microsoft’s transcription service Azure Speech to Text. With the integration, customers will be able to feed audio-to-text transcriptions of contact center interactions provided by Microsoft into CallMiner’s AI-based platform, either in real-time or batches after calls, to provide customer analytics, CallMiner said. Visualization tools and dashboards will display metrics like average handle times, sentiment analysis, and others, CallMiner added. Enterprises can purchase CallMiner with Azure Speech to Text through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and use Azure credits to acquire it, CallMiner said.

 

Poly this week unveiled a limited edition pink version of its Poly Sync 20 wireless speakerphone (see image above), which it will sell during October to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month. For each Poly Sync 20 sold, the company said it is donating $10 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

 

The Poly Sync 20 wireless speakerphone serves as an all-in-one voice-activated personal speakerphone, portable music speaker, and smartphone charger.

 

Dropbox this week announced updates that allow users to supplement their content with asynchronous communications and video collaboration tools.

 

Specifically, Dropbox Capture is an all-in-one visual communication tool for creating and sharing short video messages, including screen recordings, GIFs, and screenshots, with content collaborators, Dropbox said. A second capability, Replay, allows users to share videos for frame-by-frame commenting and annotation by collaborators, Dropbox said.

 

Capture is in beta across personal and business plans, with Replay to follow suit in the near future, Dropbox said.