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."
