RingCentral, Vonage, Amazon Make Big Statements at Enterprise Connect
Look for new voice technologies, AI and more to revolutionize the industry.
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AI-driven speech technology is set to improve enterprise collaboration, Jon Arnold said. It reduces friction in communications, and streamlines processes and workflows.
“When you have speech-enabled steps along the way for collaboration, there’s value there for getting teamwork done,” he said. “It automates tasks, and enables interactivity and accessibility. This is a theme a lot of collaboration vendors have been very central with in the past year or so, the idea that voice cuts across all boundaries. So in other words, people who have disabilities otherwise have an easy way to participate in the workforce. They can speak, they can participate, they don’t have to physically be in the room, etc. So it makes work and in particular teamwork more accessible for more people. That’s a good thing.”
Enterprise applications with speech technology include: speech to text; text to speech; automatic speech recognition (ASR); voice biometrics; noise suppression; and data to speech.
“So in the enterprise there are very good use cases for speech technology,” Arnold said. “All of these have utility in various ways, not just for direct communication, but of course for teamwork and collaboration. There’s also keeping the workplace and the network secure. There’s just so many areas here that it brings value. Now, where do we go from here? All of those cases are simply just getting better. AI keeps improving, so these use cases are still fairly new. We didn’t have them maybe two to three years ago. But we have them now and they will get better.”
Major vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Avaya, Mitel and Zoom are adding, improving and acquiring speech tech and AI, Arnold said.
“You have the niche players that are really the engines of innovation,” he said. “They just keep doing their thing. This is kind of the vanguard where all of these cool things are coming. And some are getting acquired. So companies like Deep Affects as an example, which was acquired by RingCentral.”
In addition, Babblelabs was acquired by Cisco.
More of these niche players will likely be acquired over the next year because “it’s an arms race that all of the vendors are chasing right now,” Arnold said.
In addition, enterprises now can build their own smart speech apps, he said.
“This is a fairly new kind of development in the marketplace where we don’t have to rely on partners, we don’t have to rely on Avaya, AWS, Google and Cisco, etc.” Arnold said.
Arnold offered these voice tech and AI use cases to improve collaboration:
Chatbots are evolving into conversational AI. Therefore, everyone can have personal data assistants (PDAs).
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is supporting more languages all the time, driving inclusivity.
Data-to-speech can generate audio summaries from business intelligence platforms.
Natural language understanding/natural language processing (NLU/NLP) can detect cues from your emotional state to better understand context and intent.
Maintaining compliance requirements across voice channels when collaborating.
Personalized forms of automation keep remote workers more engaged with teams.
“Enterprise use cases are pretty niche compared to the contact center,” Arnold said. “Collaboration itself is a niche use case within the enterprise for speech tech. Speech tech is a niche use case. So text to speech, speech to text, ASR, these are niche use cases of AI. You have to remember AI isn’t just about speech. It’s just one of many areas where AI is having an impact, and not just on enterprise, but the whole workspace.”
Arnold outlined three big ideas for the future of AI and speech:
Immersive workplace experiences.
Moving to a post-PC workplace. Smart devices, tablets and PCs will eventually pass. The role of speech will evolve into a world of ambient interfaces.
“Communications will become multisensory and immersive,” Arnold said. “That’s a very important shift from direct experiences. And collaboration becomes more virtual than in person. These are fundamental shifts in how we work, and AI is driving all of this and speech is very much a part of what’s happening.”
Also during Enterprise Connect, AWS announced its latest innovations for its Amazon Connect cloud contact center.
The latest capabilities for Amazon Connect are:
Amazon Wisdom. It connects relevant knowledge repositories with built-in connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce and ServiceNow, as well as internal wikis, FAQ stores and file shares. Agents can search across connected repositories to find answers and resolve customer issues.
Amazon Connect Voice ID. It uses voice-based biometrics to listen to a conversation and identify the customer. It eliminates customers having to verify their identity with security questions.
Amazon Connect Outbound Communications. Customers can run campaigns from Amazon Connect spanning voice, text and email.
Pasquale DeMaio is general manager of AWS.
“Customers who run contact centers found themselves in a year marked by pivotal transformation,” he said. “And we saw that firsthand with the adoption of AWS’ easy-to-use, omnichannel contact center. Amazon Connect was really born from the need at AWS to power our contact centers. We needed to be able to scale up from tens of agents to tens of thousands of agents. And in so doing, we had to make sure we were secure and reliable. And those are the basics, but on top of that, we needed to be able to innovate incredibly quickly, and so we needed to be self-service, and our customers have told us the same thing. The ability to make changes on their own and to build out the experiences their customers demand instantly has been incredibly powerful. Of course, taking all the technologies of a contact center and bringing them together has also is incredibly powerful.”
During its Enterprise Connect session, RingCentral announced the release of Dynamic End-to-end Encryption (E2EE) for its video products. It will be available early next year.
Nat Natarajan is RingCentral’s executive vice president of products and engineering.
“When you’re in a meeting, part of the conversation might be sensitive,” he said. “So now you have the ability to turn on true, dynamic end-to-end encryption with industry standard protocols.”
Other capabilities coming in early 2022 include live transcription, meeting summaries and next-generation analytics.
In addition, RingCentral announced it is the first non-Indian entity that’s a national service provider for UCaaS and CCaaS in India.
“This represents one-seventh of the world’s population,” Natarajan said.
To coincide with Enterprise Connect, Vonage launched AI Virtual Assistant for its unified communications solution, Vonage Business Communications (VBC).
AI Virtual Assistant creates artificially intelligent conversational experiences using NLU and machine learning (ML) that is supported by applications using voice and text to engage every caller in natural language.
In addition, it provides conversational AI to address simple tasks and facilitate voice-enabled self-service for customers. This allows organizations without a contact center to free up employees from answering high volumes of inbound calls. Moreover, it helps to improve the customer experience by providing faster responses to questions, requests and other customer needs.
Savinay Berry is Vonage‘s executive vice president of product and engineering.
“In addition to reducing and optimizing IT costs and resources, enterprises are enhancing the customer experience with the use of AI as a part of their communications strategy,” he said. “In today’s modern workplace, consumers expect to get the information they want, when they want it and they expect it to be easy to do business with a brand. By automating responses and addressing simple tasks through AI, we are transforming the way businesses across all industries connect with their customers.”
AI Virtual Assistant also includes new Vonage AI Studio capabilities. That provides a no-code user interface to enable implementation and development of advanced conversational experiences and engagement, such as self-service options and workflows, the ability to simplify complex interactions, and enables short time to delivery.
To coincide with Enterprise Connect, Vonage launched AI Virtual Assistant for its unified communications solution, Vonage Business Communications (VBC).
AI Virtual Assistant creates artificially intelligent conversational experiences using NLU and machine learning (ML) that is supported by applications using voice and text to engage every caller in natural language.
In addition, it provides conversational AI to address simple tasks and facilitate voice-enabled self-service for customers. This allows organizations without a contact center to free up employees from answering high volumes of inbound calls. Moreover, it helps to improve the customer experience by providing faster responses to questions, requests and other customer needs.
Savinay Berry is Vonage‘s executive vice president of product and engineering.
“In addition to reducing and optimizing IT costs and resources, enterprises are enhancing the customer experience with the use of AI as a part of their communications strategy,” he said. “In today’s modern workplace, consumers expect to get the information they want, when they want it and they expect it to be easy to do business with a brand. By automating responses and addressing simple tasks through AI, we are transforming the way businesses across all industries connect with their customers.”
AI Virtual Assistant also includes new Vonage AI Studio capabilities. That provides a no-code user interface to enable implementation and development of advanced conversational experiences and engagement, such as self-service options and workflows, the ability to simplify complex interactions, and enables short time to delivery.
ENTERPRISE CONNECT — New voice technologies are set to revolutionize enterprises, and speech technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound effect on collaboration in the coming years.
That’s according to Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates. His session, during this week’s virtual Enterprise Connect, focused on how speech technology and AI are creating new value for enterprises. (Enterprise Connect and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.)
J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold
“Speech technology is now strategic in its core AI applications in the enterprise,” he said. “What did we do before AI? Voice was about telephony and P2P. Speech technology was about speech recognition and speaker recognition. Communications was about direct experiences and collaboration, and mostly in person. AI in the last two to three years has really changed things up. Voice is now a data stream analytics conversation with AI. This is the transformation effect that AI is going to have and speech is just part of that.”
Voice Remains Top App
Voice remains the most natural, human way to communicate, Arnold said. For the unified communications space, it’s the stickiest of all of the apps. The shift from TDM and legacy technology to VoIP has simply made the voice story bigger. And on the business side, voice still makes money for service providers.
“Voice is the mode or channel of communication,” he said. “Speech is the content of that communication. So voice and speech are not the same things. And every new layer of AI creates new use cases and business value. So there are new ways that make voice value added with innovation. And separately from that, when you just talk about speech, when you digitize conversation, it opens up a whole new world of applications that really take speech into other realms of communication, particularly text-based forms of applications.”
The smart speaker market was flat last year, but adoption has reached 50%, Arnold said. Consumer leads the enterprise in this market, but enterprise will increasingly turn to this market and use cases for enterprise will increase.
Investigate our slideshow above for more from Jon Arnold and more Enterprise Connect news.
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