No Jitter Roll: Avaya Highlights New Capabilities, Integrations and Expanded Partnerships, while Observe.AI, Sinch, Botco.ai and Otter AI all Release Generative AI-centric Functionality

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week NJR highlights Avaya’s new integrations, product capabilities and expanded alliances; Observe.AI's LLM designed for use by contact centers; Cyara's acquisition of "voice of the customer" vendor, CentraCX; CallMiner's real-time analytics for contact center agents; Sinch's new AI integration capabilities; Botco.ai's privacy and security solutions for Generative AI; Otter AI's new summarization features; and Zoom's Scheduler is now in general availability.

New Avaya Integrations, Capabilities and Expanded Alliances Empower Cloud Innovations

At Avaya ENGAGE 2023, the contact center services provider announced new platform integrations and capabilities, along with expanded strategic alliances with Google and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

Avaya has introduced a suite of hybrid Avaya Experience Platform services. Avaya Experience Platform Connect enables organizations to leverage their existing on-premises infrastructure for voice routing, call handling, and more, while accessing omnichannel voice and digital channels from the cloud. Call Center Elite voice agents can access functionalities such as WebRTC voice, AI Noise Removal, and personalized unified agent desktops through Avaya Experience Platform Workspaces.

Other recent, additional features include:

• Over 130 languages available to the Automation DialogFlow.
• Customer calls with context data and streamlined CRM integration.
• Upgraded reporting with data visualization and new KPIs.
• Enhanced orchestration and self-service capabilities which gives administrators more control over customer engagement workflows.
• Customer Journey APIs and enhanced self-service APIs for complex automation, along with Queue Metrics Synchronous API to provide real-time insights into queue metrics.

Avaya has also expanded its partnerships with Google and Alcatel-Lucent. This expansion includes news that the Avaya Experience Platform passed the contact center technical validation for Chrome Enterprise Recommended for ChromeOS.

In other news, Alvaria will integrate its Alvaria Cloud solutions for outbound interactions, regulatory and compliance management, and convenient time to call capabilities with Avaya's Elite contact center and Enterprise Cloud solutions.

Want to know more?

Check out Eric Krapf’s coverage of Avaya Engage 2023 – he discussed Avaya’s vision of where they go next (since the company recently entered and exited bankruptcy earlier in 2023) with respect to customer experience and cloud strategies.

Observe.AI Introduces 30-Billion-Parameter Contact Center LLM with New Generative AI Product Suite

Observe.AI has introduced a Contact Center LLM and Generative AI Suite. The company used its proprietary large language model (LLM), trained on a domain-specific dataset of hundreds of millions of customer interactions and 30 billion parameters; the data is completely redacted of any Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

“By leveraging a domain-specific LLM, we’re able to drive deeper trend analysis, more accurate call summarization, and in-context question answering while ensuring degrees of control, calibration, and privacy that are simply not possible with generic models,” said Vache Moroyan, SVP of Product at Observe.AI.

• The generative AI capabilities include providing answers to customer questions, providing interaction summaries and serving up coaching notes for agents as soon as a customer interaction ends

Cyara Acquires CentraCX Adding Voice of the Customer (VOC) to its Portfolio

Cyara, a Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Platform provider, has acquired CentraCX, a SaaS-based Voice of the Customer (VOC) solution that is designed for the contact center.

CentraCX can capture and collect data from different channels for analysis and insights, including voice, SMS, web, and email. CentraCX also provides “Tribal Analytics,” a proprietary, technology-enabled process that marries customer feedback with the agent perspective.

Alok Kulkarni, CEO and Co-founder of Cyara, said in the press release that “With the acquisition of CentraCX, we are uniquely able to offer an AI-enabled CX transformation platform that informs CX design with customer insights and feedback and enables delivery of those designs with speed and quality through automated testing and monitoring.”

CallMiner Adds New Real-Time Analytics Capabilities

CallMiner has added feature updates and user interface improvements to RealTime, its real-time agent guidance product. These new capabilities include:

• Live Insights: Enables contact center supervisors to deliver an ‘insight,” via desktop alert, to support agents during customer interactions.
• Live Listen: Authorized supervisors can now listen in on agent conversations as they happen.
• Agent Call for Help: Agents can proactively ask a supervisor or authorized user for help during a customer interaction.

“AI components can enable better agent guidance, while ‘human in the loop’ capabilities support the review and augmentation of AI-generated alerts,” said Bruce McMahon, VP of Product Management with CallMiner.

Sinch Launches Conversation API for AI-powered Customer Messaging

The cloud-based communications services provider has launched an AI-powered capability called Smart Conversations which is integrated into Sinch's Conversation API. Smart Conversations uses AI to analyze incoming messages from channels supported on Conversation API. Some of the key features of Smart Conversations include automatic intent recognition and sentiment analysis, as well as models that enable document comprehension from images (OCR), profanity detection, document classification and automatic audio transcription.

According to Jon Campbell, senior director of messaging products, Sinch, “This type of integration helps both our B2B software builders as well as our enterprise customers as it enables natural language processing (NLP) tasks to be trained with fewer examples, leading to more accurate responses and improved customer experiences.

In addition to its own proprietary Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engines that power its chatbots, Sinch also offers integrations to external AI models like ChatGPT.

Botco.ai Brings Enterprise-Level Privacy and Security to Generative AI Applications

Botco.ai has launched GenAI Chat Cloud which uses generative AI to provide answers to user questions in a conversational manner. The suite of products can be deployed for use in sales, marketing and/or customer relationship initiatives within an enterprise. The solution relies on proprietary, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to sort, analyze and contextualize information from enterprise data and applications—including websites, CRM, EMR, CMS and other proprietary data sources.

The Botco.ai GenAI Chat Cloud is trained on an enterprises’ proprietary data and comes with SOC2 compliance, data governance capabilities, HIPAA validation, and more, to help ensure that responses avoid the “hallucinations” potentially delivered via other AI chatbots. The GenAI Chat Cloud can provide customer behavior analysis, craft bots that draw from company documentation, and do CRM and analytics. g, how they’re asking those questions, and how campaigns are performing.

“Generative AI is a proven game changer as enterprises seek new ways of engaging with customers, prospects and other stakeholders,” said Rebecca Clyde, CEO of Botco.ai. “But the solutions on the market today are limited in what they can do for an enterprise because they aren’t trained on the data and information that matters most—the enterprise’s own content.”

Otter AI Chat: Now Generates Meeting-specific Insight and Content

The provider of meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration applications, announced Otter AI Chat which provides various capabilities:

• Users can ask Otter AI Chat about discussion points or key decisions that were discussed during a meeting or conversation. Otter AI Chat will provide answers from context available within the discussion.
• Within Otter AI Chat, users can collaborate with each other without interrupting the verbal discussion.
• Use meeting content to deliver action items, summaries, follow-up emails, blog posts, and other content.

Otter AI Chat will roll out to all users over the coming days. As with previous Otter.ai features, data used in Otter AI Chat will not be stored by third parties.

“Though ChatGPT has great knowledge based on public data, it can’t answer any questions about your own team meetings. Also, it’s only a 1:1 human-robot chat with no team collaboration," said Sam Liang, CEO and cofounder of Otter.ai.

Want to know more about Generative AI?

Consider the following thought leadership pieces about the use of generative AI:

• Understanding the Role of Generative AI in Modernizing Customer Experience: Generative AI is impacting the role of customer service agents, challenging the belief that AI might make these roles redundant. Despite significant recent advancements there are situations where generative AI falls short.
• Are We Moving Too Fast with AI? A sneak peek at some key themes that emerged from a joint RingCentral/Ipsos survey of full-time workers around the world who were asked about their attitudes and expectations regarding the use of AI in the workplace.
• Finally, we have our generative AI cheat sheet, which gives succinct definitions for all the terms you're likely to hear whenever anyone's talking about this new technology.

Zoom Scheduler, Now Generally Available: Align Calendars with Clients and Contacts

The new Zoom Scheduler works with Zoom Meetings and Zoom Mail and Calendar and integrates with Google Calendar and Microsoft 365. It allows users to:

• Schedule one-on-one meetings or one-to-many group meetings and specify how many people can attend any available slot.
• Choose recurring availability or custom availability for one-off meetings.
• Generate slots of availability when any or all team members are available.
• Automate and customize email notifications.
• Collect preferred information during the attendee booking process.

Free and paid Zoom users can try the product out for free before July 19, 2023. On July 20, 2023, it will be available for purchase for $5.99/month per user. Zoom Scheduler will be included in the Zoom One Business Plus and Enterprise Plus plans.

This Week on No Jitter

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

• Moving to UCaaS? The time to prepare is now: Advance work will help “jump start” the implementation process by having pre-assembled much of the critical information that would be asked of your company. Investing the effort early on will pay dividends as you make the journey to UCaaS.
• NICE Frees its ElevateAI Transcription Service: NICE sees ElevateAI as an opportunity to build its pipeline: help smaller customers today for free, with the hopes of winning future business.
• The Market for Contact Center as a Service Is Looking Bright: A lot of factors drive the move from on-premises to multi-tenant, cloud-based contact centers, from aging infrastructure to smaller, nimbler business operations.