No Jitter Roll: RingCentral Plans Deeper Integration With Teams

Welcome to this week's No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This edition of NJR covers a spate of AI-related products from Zendesk, Dialpad, Salesforce and ASAPP, RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0, and several new offerings from Webex, Google and Verizon which further collaboration solutions.

RingCentral Announces RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0

The solution brings RingCentral’s cloud PBX capabilities into Microsoft Teams with a native experience, and without requiring a second application. In other words,  RingCentral is now directly integrated within the Teams application.

In addition, RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 now includes:

• Automatically detected/synced presence status between Microsoft Teams and RingCentral, including hardphones.
• Searchable Contacts from both Microsoft and RingCentral directories.
• The ability to place and receive calls through the RingCentral integration in the Microsoft Teams mobile app.
• Advanced phone features such as a smart sidecar panel for quick access to key contacts, monitor, whisper, barge-in, and queue management.

Mo Katibeh, President and COO of RingCentral, said, "Many businesses have standardized on Teams for internal collaboration, but when it comes to advanced communications, customers often seek out third-party solutions. We’re excited to deliver this next generation of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams.”

The new RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 solution will be available in open beta at the end of May and generally available this summer.

ASAPP Launches AutoAssist, a AI-powered product for Contact Center Agents

AutoAssist is the latest in ASAPP's suite of generative AI customer experience products. AutoAssist analyzes conversations as they happen and automatically provides real-time recommendations and prompts to agents.

Salesforce Brings Conversational AI to Work With Launch of Slack GPT

Slack GPT is a new conversational AI experience natively integrated into Slack. The new feture offers multiple productivity perks. For example, AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance will be available directly in Slack. Customers will also be able to build no-code workflows that embed AI actions with prompts at each step, making it possible for anyone to deploy AI automation. Customers can also securely integrate a large language model (LLM) from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, or use the LLM of their choice. 

“Generative AI has enormous potential to redefine how work is done and unlock significant business productivity,” said Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack. “The real power of this technology is when AI can analyze and act on the most valuable data from a company’s most trusted resource — its own internal knowledge."

Factoreal Announces New Generative AI Features for Email Marketing Campaigns

Factoreal has released of four new AI-powered email marketing features to its customer engagement platform. They are:

• Smart Headings: This feature allows users to choose specific suggested keywords to draft targeted subject lines.
• Smart Buttons: Users can create targeted call-to-actions (CTA) along with suggestions of the most pertinent voice/tone of the CTA button.
• Image Generator: This lets users convert text into unique images.
• Text Generator: Email marketers can refine text to better reflect a consistent brand voice for the targeted audience.

Zendesk Announces AI Designed Exclusively for Intelligent CX

Zendesk has introduced Zendesk AI a new technology layer which combines Zendesk’s data and insights with new AI technologies, including the company’s proprietary models and  large language models (LLMs). For example, thanks to a partnership with OpenAI, the Zendesk AI product now includes response rephrasing and tone shift which are designed to help guide agents in tailoring their customer interactions.

The other new capabilities in Zendesk AI include:

• Pre-trained bots for messaging and email which leverage Zendesk’s database of customer intents to deliver personalized, industry-specific and accurate responses.
• Agent assistance: Provides agents with AI-generated content to help them during customer interactions.
• Intelligent triage: Uses intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis to classify incoming customer requests and create workflows based on those insights. 

Dialpad Builds on Proprietary Generative AI Capabilities with Google Cloud Partnership and Vertex AI

Vertex AI is a AI/ML platform that allows applications to integrate AI and ML features. Using Google Vertex with Dialpad Ai, Dialpad will soon introduce Ai Recap which will summarize meetings and calls. Dialpad plans to release other features based on this partnership, including Ai Scorecards for automated evaluation of customer interactions against established criteria and Ai Playbooks, which will provide real-time suggestions to sales and service agents. 

Webex Now Supported on Android Auto, Progressive Web App on ChromeOS Now Supports Combined Webex Meetings and Webex Messaging

Webex has announced that it will now be supported on Android Auto in more than 500 models of vehicles that support the software. Webex has also announced that its Progressive Web App (PWA) for ChromeOS will now support combined Webex Meetings and Webex Messaging.

Available later in 2023, Webex for Android Auto uses the familiar Webex meeting and calling controls for when meetings must be joined while driving. This car-based implementation uses audio-only experiences to minimize driver distraction and provide a view of upcoming meetings, recent calls, and access to Webex contacts.

Available now, Webex PWA is Chrome Enterprise Recommended (a program created by Google to help enterprises find solutions). Webex PWA can be installed from the Webex website, then pinned to the shelf for easier access.

BlueJeans by Verizon expands Partner Program to include Partner Leads

The BlueJeans by Verizon Partner Lead Program, which is available in the U.S., enables partners to offer BlueJeans Basic to its customers from their website and allows for registration for customers and opportunity tracking for partners. This partner program is open to partners by invitation only and is currently accepting partner requests to join. Cynrgi Direct, a multi-brand technology solutions provider for small, medium, and large enterprises in the U.S., is the first partner to participate in the program.

Paul Velusamy, Founder and CEO, Cynrgi Labs Inc., said, “By partnering with an industry leader such as BlueJeans, we are expanding our scope and breadth of services, while enabling lead sharing functionalities to address this…market and grow each other's customer base.”

This Week on No Jitter

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

• Do You Really Want ChatGPT Talking to Your Customers?: Generative AI promises to revolutionize the contact center industry, but is this just another attempt at avoiding the obvious: You have to pay agents more if they are going to care about your customers.
• How Verizon Enables Scalable And Seamless Multi-Vendor SASE: Secure access service edge (SASE) deployments have seen strong momentum thanks to increased complexity in managing networks and dealing with security threats.
• SharpenCX Acquires Webtext: The buy will help mid-market firms accomplish a digital transformation with an agent-first focus.