Avaya adds AI voice assistant to desk phones

With the release of a voice assistant for desk phones, Avaya is the latest unified communications vendor to explore whether the artificial intelligence technology increasingly popular among consumers has value in the enterprise market. The voice assistant, available for download in the Google Play Store, lets users verbally command their Avaya Vantage phones to make calls, dial into the next meeting on a calendar, and execute Google searches. People activate the artificial intelligence (AI) technology with a customizable trigger phrase; the default is "Hello Vantage." "Avaya is engaging in far-field voice activation at an inflection point in the industry: Voice assistants will disrupt enterprise communications and UC," Gartner analyst Werner Goertz said. "In future, rather than to dial into meetings and conference calls, we will simply say'Assistant, dial me into my 10 o'clock meeting' -- no user IDs, passwords, conference IDs that the user needs to remember."