Artificial Intelligence (AI)

With only three minutes to demonstrate how they’re “Driving better experiences through innovation and disruption,” six technology solutions competed in the Talkdesk

When a reporter asked me “Why do you think Microsoft would acquire Nuance?” my initial reaction was “Because they can.” Microsoft has the resources, and it makes sense to invest in an area such as AI and speech recognition.

There are other several reasons why Microsoft acquiring Nuance make sense:

Introduction

On March 16, 2021, Genesys announced their intent to acquire Bold360 from LogMeIn. Bold360 currently offers:

On our recent BCS Expert podcast on best practices for using video, collaboration and teams, Kevin Kieller talked about the data from meetings and usage that is gathered in Microsoft Teams. He talked about how it shows issues in how people meet today. In fact, cloud-based communication and collaboration applications gather an amazing amount of information during every meeting event. Every time a new person speaks it generates a change that is noted.

Artificial Intelligence is a major topic today, not just in communications and Contact Centers, but across business. Most of the current crop of business-focused “AI” is in fact Machine Learning (ML). In ML, a large data set is used to “train” the algorithm to predict an outcome based on a range of interacting variables. Using modern data sets that have millions and even billions of test sets and thousands of variables, the ML program is able to train a neural network to predict an outcome.

It’s not often that you get to attend a conference in Ireland and stay in a castle, but analysts at the recent Genesys Analyst Summit got to experience both the wonderful hospitality of the Irish while staying at the lovely Ashford Castle near Galway. Galway was an appropriate locale, as Genesys has a major presence in the city thanks to its acquisition of Altocloud.

Last week Cisco held its annual Contact Center Sales Summit in Hollywood, Florida. This year's gathering of product managers, sales overlays, channels, and technology partners increased in size by 50% and, for the first time, included some customers. Cisco collaboration applications business grew 15% last fiscal year, a noticeable uplift over the previous ones. It gave the company the opportunity to share its ambitions for its contact center product line.