Why Dubber’s ‘Moments’ Could Transform Conversational Intelligence

If you speak to anyone about the hottest trends affecting the UC and collaboration sector in 2023, nine times out of ten, AI will be the first idea they suggest.

There is an ocean of excitement and fascination about AI’s incredible current capabilities and its seemingly boundless potential.

For those without a computer science or machine learning background, it can also be a little daunting when discussed in the abstract. This is why many of those vendors enjoying early commercial success with AI-powered solutions are shrewd enough to package them in palatable products that the average business user can get excited about.

That could well be a key selling point for network-based conversational intelligence vendor Dubber, which is optimistic that its new AI-powered offering, Moments, will revolutionise conversational intelligence. In fact, as Dubber CEO Steve McGovern outlined to UC Today, that’s precisely Dubber’s strategy.

“The whole point of the release for Moments is it’s a productized version of AI that is recognizable,” McGovern explained. “It’s got defined outcomes as opposed to this big sort of unstructured concept of transcription and AI. We hope, we trust, that it’s an easy sell for UC service providers of any size.”

Dubber’s vision behind Moments is to extend beyond conversational intelligence’s traditional transcription functionality towards addressing the holistic needs of modern businesses with actionable and valuable insights.

The AI-powered feature uses context within voice conversations to identify essential information that can then inform strategies. “It’s a very straightforward proposition,” McGovern added, “but the essence is it starts bringing networks to life. It’s about actually taking the content out of the networks and turning them into usable data and usable insights.”

What Moments mean in practice is illustrated by Dubber’s first “voice of the customer” Moment, called “Complaints”. This feature identifies customer complaints and related topics within conversations. The Complaints Moment enables businesses to quickly gain insights into customer issues.

This will soon be followed up with “Actions”, the first “Performance”-related Moment, a network feature that detects commitments made during conversations and converts them into tasks or reminders.

The Action Moment was always the Holy Grail. To be able to have a mobile call, and then at the end of that call, have the Action item summarized and sent to you on an SMS. That is a true demonstration of revolution in the sector.”

“In terms of Complaints, it was a customer demand,” he added. “We had a couple of customers who came to us and said, ‘Hey, what can you do with some of the data that we’ve got?’ Very quickly in testing (Moments), they began understanding what was the voice of their customer.”

Both Actions and Complaints Moments are “delivered in the same package, so the core technology is the same,” explained McGovern. “It’s just the way we actually tune. If you’d like the natural language to deliver the AI outcome, we can actually work with the provider and deliver an outcome in a really short space of time that they can sell to their customer base.”

A single Moment provides immediate value within a conversation, but when many Moments are correlated across a business, it creates a portfolio of “Insights”. Using data visualisation, Insights illustrates a case study of communication patterns and trends, turning complex data into digestible intelligence for business leaders and analysts.

Every part of Moments is available via the API, so the feature can work into business users’ workflows or Salesforce vectors, for example. The offering doesn’t need to be viewed in the Dubber application. The summarization can also be provided to the business user weekly and monthly as reports, as well as being able to watch it in real-time in the application.

But where did the concept behind Moments originate?

“When we built the Dubber platform, it was initially for AWS two years before AWS came to Australia, and we always had a vision of being able to build something that scales to be able to serve any user on a service provider network,” McGovern said. “Very quickly, that vision became about AI, and we purchased a very smart company in Australia called Notiv two years ago.”

“Notiv had very little to no revenue, but they had a world of talent with some really creative people and were headed up by Dr Iain McCowan, who is an expert in the field. The first iteration was around transcription, but it was unstructured. You don’t really want to be going through the whole of the transcription to get the pieces that you want.”

“That’s where the idea of Moments came from — to deliver something either on a phone immediately or in an email, or however you want it. It gives you a summarization of the call and enables you to dig into it if you want to, but ultimately it’s about delivering convenience and an outcome.”

Moments and Dubber’s investment in AI aim to fulfil Dubber’s vision of “capturing content and creating content from the network”, as McGovern described it. “In essence, it’s about turning the service providers from being utility providers into content providers.”

Dubber’s vision was complemented three years ago by a Gartner survey that said that by 2025, 75 percent of all business calls would be recorded. “I think ‘recorded’ is the wrong word,” McGovern said. “I think ‘captured’ is the right word because it’s all about capturing the data and not listening to recordings.”

(The Gartner survey) was something that backed up our vision. We’ve been talking about a phrase we used back in 2020, ‘AI for every phone’. We genuinely believe that AI will be a standard feature on every telephony connection.”

There was naturally some anticipation within the company over how the solution would be received by Dubber’s network of over 170 global service provider partners. Dubber launched Moments at last week’s Cisco Live, and McGovern was thrilled with the partners’ response.

“We’ve been really happy with the response to the concept,” he said. “We get the usual response which is, ‘How difficult, how easy is it to deploy? Is it gonna take years?'”

“For any one of our carriers that’s already got our call recording product, there’s no change,” McGovern added. “You can literally switch this on, and it is available today. I think that’s one of the key attributes. For our existing customers, it’s really easy, and for new customers, they can connect to the network really quickly and start using it.”

“Funnily enough, the UC providers in the UK are the ones who’ve reacted first,” McGovern continued. “They want to actually start something now. So your mid-tier service providers are very keen to actually get it up and running to the point where we have been training them today.”

Dubber isn’t standing still and basking in the enthusiastic response to Moments’ launch. In fact, the functionality of the technology means Dubber can plan an extensive product roadmap for the next few months and years.

“We believe we can release a different Moment every month,” McGovern said. “We’ve got three or four lined up already.”

“This time next month, we’ll have another one that relates to Abuse. When you talk about the voice of the customer, you also talk about the voice of employees, and with abuse, this has come off the back of customer demand from a retail chain here in Australia whose staff are in this women’s underwear global brand. They get a lot of phone calls they don’t want coming into the stores every day, so they asked us if we could actually do something about that.”

McGovern stressed that the underlying technology is the same and that the dashboards are the same. Only the content is different. The task is training the AI to deliver the necessary themed outcome. The charging will be individual and themed, too. This allows Dubber to package Moments up, creating flexibility across the products on offer.

“I think what will really resonate with some of the carriers and some of your larger enterprise customers is we can put some of these Moments into themes,” McGovern commented. “If you think about Abuse and the voice of the employee, there are some real tangible ESG outcomes for that. So, ESGs are a huge topic at the top end of town for all the listed companies, banks, et cetera. I think for the carriers to be able to provide an ESG-based AI product from the network, I think would resonate.”

Dubber’s future is found in rolling out its AI and consumable products because it is, as McGovern described it, a “game-changer”.

Moments “gives the carriers a completely different lens where there can be content providers and actually find different ways of charging for real value because the carriers have got billions of calls going through their network,” McGovern said. “That’s their asset. They’ve just never been able to monetize it properly, and hopefully, what we do is enable them to do that.”

“For the service provider, it adds a revenue stream in a diminishing revenue world, which, let’s be honest, is important for service providers at the moment. The other thing it does, I think, is it allows them to differentiate. One of your service providers could come and actually tailor with us an outcome specific to the customer base that would differentiate them from other providers.”

“From a product perspective, (Dubber’s) future is really about capitalizing on the demand and capability of AI,” he continued. “From a corporate perspective, it’s literally about getting the message across really, really clearly.”

It is early days for Moments, but the signs are that message is coming across crystal clear.