Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. This week NJR highlights the generative AI-powered solutions for summarization and insight introduced by Dubber and Glean, as well as some of the new features Miro brought to its workforce collaboration product while beefing up data security and privacy. Cisco Live saw some announcements around the company’s expanded hardware options – including interoperability with Microsoft Teams. Also, SugarCRM and sales-i partnered to drive sales intelligence, Nureva partnered with Lumens for highly accurate camera positioning, and Apple teased FaceTime for AppleTV..
Dubber Introduces Conversational AI Solution “Moments”
The new AI-driven product, “Moments,” extends the capabilities of the company’s conversational intelligence and capture services for communication service providers. “Moments” is designed to pinpoint particular topics within overall voice-/telephony-based conversations between a contact center agent and a CSP’s customer, then identify identifies the context within voice conversations. Those individual topics can then be rolled up to provide insight into trends across the CSP’s organization.
Steve McGovern, CEO of Dubber, stated, “With the unprecedented volume of data available to train our Dubber AI engine, we’re turning every conversation into a chance to extract valuable moments that can enhance customer understanding, elevate employee experience, and identify product improvement opportunities.”
The initial rollout begins with the “Complaints Moment,” which pinpoints customer complaints and related topics within conversations. Following this, “Actions Moment” will roll out. This feature detects commitments made during conversations and converts them into tasks or reminders.
At the launch of Moments, Stuart Pritchard, Vice President, Optus Enterprise, said, “Currently, Dubber is assisting Optus in a special campaign…around automatically detecting complaints for organizations and summarization of calls for each user.”
Glean Delivers a Generative AI Chat Assistant
Glean Chat is a generative AI chat assistant that enables users to answer questions, analyze and synthesize information, and create insights from a company’s own knowledge base. Glean Chat can tie into more than 100 applications including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Jira and GitHub.
Glean Chat uses Glean’s trusted knowledge model, which is built around three pillars:
- Company knowledge and context: Glean retrains deep learning language models on a company’s knowledge base and develops an understanding of content, internal language, people and the relationships within an organization. This organizational insight trains the assistant to recognize nuances like how people collaborate, how each piece of information relates to another, and what information is most relevant to each user.
- Permissions and data governance: Glean ensures that users only have access to information that they’re allowed to see.
- Full references: For generative AI results, Glean provides full linking to source information across documents, conversations and applications, thus providing a higher level of transparency and trust.
Want to know more?
Generative AI is one of the hottest topics both with respect to summarization, as well its inclusion in the overall employee and customer experience. Consider the following thought leadership pieces about the use of generative AI:
- Understanding the Role of Generative AI in Modernizing Customer Experience: Generative AI is impacting the role of customer service agents, challenging the belief that AI might make these roles redundant. Despite significant, recent advancements there are situations where generative AI falls short – which, paradoxically, makes customer service agents both less and more important.
- Are We Moving Too Fast with AI? A sneak peek at some key themes that emerged from a joint RingCentral/Ipsos survey of full-time workers around the world who were asked about their attitudes and expectations regarding the use of AI in the workplace.
- Finally, we have our generative AI cheat sheet, which gives succinct definitions for all the terms you’re likely to hear whenever anyone’s talking about this new technology.
Miro adds 50+ Collaboration features and Provides Tighter Data Security and Privacy
Miro is an online workspace that enables distributed teams of any size to collaborate. Some of the new features Miro released in the first quarter of 2023 include:
- Private Mode: Gives teams a private space to reword, prepare, and reflect within a meeting or retrospective.
- Miro Talktrack: Makes it possible to record video or audio walkthroughs of the board. Viewers can then interact directly with the board, creating an immersive collaborative experience.
- Clustering: Powered by AI and machine learning, clustering identifies similar sticky notes, visualize themes, and organize many kinds of information. In addition to clustering by color or tag, users now can cluster sticky notes by sentiment and keyword.
- Hosting: Miro now provides its customers with the ability to host compute infrastructure, production data, and backup data in EU-based data centers, thus allowing customers more stringent compliance with EU privacy laws, including GDPR and other regulations such as the UK Data Protection Act. Additionally, all customer data is encrypted in transit.
- Enterprise Key Management: Miro offers enterprise customers an optional add-on, Enterprise Key Management, which provides centralized control over the encryption keys used to protect data.
Varun Parmar, chief product officer of Miro, said that “The new features and capabilities we released in Q1 reflect what we’re hearing from enterprise teams every day – they want better ways to ideate and design, contextualize information among their cross-functional teams, and the ability to iterate quickly and efficiently.”
Want to know more?
Security is a constant concern, particularly with the persistence of hybrid and remote work. Check out the following articles to learn more:
SugarCRM and sales-i Partner to Provide Predictive B2B Sales Intelligence
Sales-i provides sales enablement software; SugarCRM offers a CRM platform to help marketing, sales and service teams get a clearer picture of their customers. These two companies have partnered to provide a joint solution to companies in the manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution sectors.
The sales-i cloud-based platform identifies hidden cross-sell and upsell opportunities within a customer based on previous sales patterns to help unlock the next deal. Following purchase, sales-i calculates the probability of the order of an associated product, giving salesperson insights on additional revenue opportunities. These real-time sales insights are delivered to the Sugar dashboard, with insights such as a confidence score of the opportunity’s accuracy and potential value.
Want to know more?
Check out the following articles to learn more about CRM solutions and how they fit with the category of contact center as a service (CCaaS) products:
Nureva Announces Integration with Lumens for Precise, Positional Camera Tracking
Nureva, a provider of audio conferencing solutions, has announced an integration with Lumens Digital Optics that pairs Nureva’s HDL410 audio conferencing system with Lumens’ PTZ cameras.
Using Nureva’s sound location device API, available through the Nureva Developer Toolkit, and the Lumens CamConnect Pro, this software-free integration allows coordinate-based location data from Nureva’s HDL410 system to steer one or multiple cameras to where people are speaking in the room.
Nureva’s API streams data regarding sound location and sound level which are reported several times per second to enable automatic camera adjustments based on the location of the talker or multiple talkers.
Steven Liang, VP of product development at Lumens Digital Optics Inc., said “Our combined products offer large room audio coverage and superb sound location data with accurate voice-tracking conferencing cameras to deliver an enhanced hybrid meeting experience.”
Want to know more?
Check out the following articles to learn more about video and collaboration:
Apple Will Bring FaceTime, Webex and Zoom to Apple TV 4K
Apple announced that in fall 2023, Apple TV 4K users can use the new version of the FaceTime app on Apple TV and initiate calls directly from Apple TV, or start calls on iPhone or iPad, and hand them off to Apple TV.
Video conferencing apps like Webex by Cisco and Zoom will also launch on Apple’s tvOS. Developers will be able to use Continuity Camera APIs on Apple TV 4K to integrate the iPhone or iPad camera and microphone into their tvOS app.
There has been speculation that Apple would enter the (crowded) enterprise collaboration space. And while that is still possible, Apple emphasized home usage when introducing the feature. “tvOS 17 transforms the biggest screen in the home with FaceTime and new video conferencing capabilities, giving Apple TV 4K users the ability to easily connect with anyone right from their living room,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
Cisco Announces Hardware for Hybrid Work
The networking and collaborative communication solutions provider announced a slew of new products aimed at enhancing the hybrid work experience; as Joel Bailon, Cisco’s VP of business development and partnerships, said: ” We think of hybrid work as helping organizations and people turn any space into a productive and safe place to work.” The products aimed at boosting any space’s productivity include:
The Room Bar Pro, a video bar optimized for medium workspaces, or 5-10 seats. The bar’s video capabilities include dual 48MP lenses, AI-infused image processing, motorized tilt, and advanced zoom; attendees have options for manual camera control, or settings like automatic group overview, dynamic speaker view, or AI-directed people cropping so everyone is equally framed in the meeting. The Room Bar Pro can connect to up to room peripherals like external screens or microphones.
In the release announcing the product, Cisco explained its decision to target mid-size spaces: “We asked facilities experts about their top workspace priorities, and 73% say that they are most likely to video-enable medium spaces in the next 3 years. Medium-sized rooms are top of mind for our customers as they prepare for return to office.”
The Room Bar Pro will retail for approximately $8,295.
Cisco also released news stressing its devices’ interoperability with other collaborative platforms: the company announced its devices will support a native Microsoft Teams Room experience. The Room Bar and Desk Pro are now Certified for Microsoft Teams, with the the Room Kit EQ and Room Kit Pro expected to reach certification at the end of June, and the new Room Bar Pro following in July. The Desk Pro for Microsoft Teams Display mode and the Room Navigator as a Microsoft Teams Panel are both expected to reach beta by August, and reach certification in Q3 2023. All certified devices will be manageable in both the Cisco Control Hub and the Teams Admin Center and Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal.
Editor’s note: Cisco underwrote No Jitter’s travel to Cisco Live.
This Week on No Jitter
In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories for the week:
