Meeting via Microsoft Teams, Guy Yaffe, VP Recording Business Line, AudioCodes, demonstrated the power of its Meeting Insights platform. Last year, I met with Nimrode Borovsky, VP and General Manager, Enterprise, AudioCodes, who gave me a verbal breakdown of AudioCodes’ soon-to-be-launched AI-powered voice assistant.
‘Meeting Insights’ is now available, and this time I got a demo during our interview. The in-meeting voice assistant manages to capture all action items, notes, decisions, summaries as well as extend full meeting transcriptions. “Organizations can add their terms to a specialized dictionary for those harder to recognize words,” I’m told. He showed me how users can search for meeting content utilizing keywords, the person speaking, or through visual content. There are even built-in tools for editing, content sharing, along with email notifications for users. AudioCodes’ smart technology even collects data from multiple sources, including in-room and remote participants.
The whole experience was quite seamless and well integrated into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. The most impressive part of AudioCodes’ AI technology is, by far, ‘Mia’, the company’s meeting voice assistant. Yaffe told me, this kind of user experience is needed in today’s enterprise landscape, and can help a company stand out above all the noise and competition.
“Meetings can become overloaded with information, and that means there needs to be a viable solution to this problem because businesses want employees to have productive online meetings, that’s the reality”
Employees should find it a more seamless experience to work-from-home, given the gravity of the status quo. Yaffe said that doesn’t just mean offering a lot of features. If you want to offer real value, he contends, the features must be packaged into a consumable model that’s easy for customers to comprehend. According to a Harvard Business Review survey of 182 senior managers, 71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Sixty-five percent said meetings kept them from performing the duties of their job, with 64 percent stating, meetings came at the expense of deep thinking. These statistics do not surprise, nor should they catch anyone who ever participated in any form of a meeting off guard.
Nonetheless, there’s a lot of time wasted in meetings, both in-person and digital. Consider this, numerous studies chronicle how meetings can stifle creativity as well as productivity. Not to mention, distractions like daydreaming, new COVID-19 era challenges such as poor internet connectivity, and other real-life distractions that just happen. Entering one, or any of these loops can become a vicious cycle of non-productivity. Yaffe gave an example of the kinds of real-world and practical issues AudioCodes set out to solve with its latest, Meeting Insights, telling me:
“How many times have you been in a meeting and failed to deliver on an action item because you did not write it down?”
“We’ve solved that with Meeting Insights, you can mark key moments with built-in tagging and automatic keyword detection.”
For much of AudioCodes’ 30-year history in the enterprise communications business, the company’s demonstrated the power of innovation in the space, with its most recent offering being a taste of what they’ve been up to for much of that time. It could also very well be a look into the future of AudioCodes and what it has in store.
