Imagine a customer-service center that speaks your language, no matter what it is. Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, that runs customer-service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects. So an Alorica representative who speaks, say, only Spanish can field a complaint about a balky printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica wouldn't need to hire a rep who speaks Cantonese. Such is the power of AI.

This week Dialpad announced the evolution of its "TrueCaaS" strategy, using the phrase "AI-Powered Customer Intelligence." The company had been using TrueCaaS to describe its single cloud software stack that can deliver Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). One of the primary benefits of a converged platform is having a single data lake with which to perform analytics to make business decisions. Most communications vendors offer UCaaS or CCaaS and then partner for the other capability. Dialpad is one of the few that has built a single, cloud native stack to deliver both.

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In recent years, the world has seen a shift in the new normal as COVID-19 continues to disrupt economies around the globe, creating long-lasting ramifications that have spread to all aspects of our lives. As consumers grow used to conducting their daily activities over contactless and frictionless channels, the rapid acceleration of digital technology and services has led to an uptick in call volume at call centers across Indonesia. Pandemic-weary consumers have run out of patience, and want both speed and flexibility in their digital interactions. This is where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come in. Big data technology, including AI, will prove invaluable to businesses for years to come, automating customer support services and self-service requests, helping businesses in Indonesia to scale efficiently and effectively.

Robotic process automation firm Automation Anywhere Inc. is bringing its smarts into contact centers, helping call center agents become more efficient by quickly surfacing the information they need to handle customer calls. Automation Anywhere is widely considered one of the leaders in the fast-growing RPA market, valued at north of $6.8 billion. The company's Automation 360 platform enables companies to create artificial intelligence-based robots that can assume numerous repetitive manual tasks in a business that are normally performed by human workers. The bots work by observing how humans carry out these tasks, which might including copying records to and from different business applications, for example. They teach themselves how to replicate these workflows so they can be automated in future.

Cisco this afternoon announced its intent to acquire speech technology startup BabbleLabs. BabbleLabs, founded in 2017, today focuses on improving meeting quality through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. BabbleLabs offers noise suppression and speech enhancement technology, called Clear Edge, that is able to distinguish human voices and quickly mute out all of the non-voice background noise. A couple of examples that most people are likely familiar with are the loud typist and the potato-chip eater. Both are annoying and highly disruptive to meetings.

According to a recent survey by Discover, 7 out of 10 Americans will take to the roadways, railways and airways for some kind of vacation this summer. Given the changeable nature of travel, there will certainly be an uptick in customer service calls. And I'll make a prediction: this summer's travel season will bring new and unique customer service challenges that, unlike in years past, are completely solvable with the right technology and strategic partner guiding your organization. So, let's start with one of the key challenges in the travel industry: simply maintaining excellent customer service during the high season of June through September. High demand, with customers asking seemingly constant questions about everything from how they can easily change their flights, to why they are not eligible for marketed reduced rates, to upgrades that might be available for hotel rooms, can spread resources thin.

"In the past, large volumes of data made us sweat". So said Pari Bajpay, vice president of Next Generation Enablement at CenturyLink, during a presentation titled "Can AI deliver its promise of a cost-effective, improved experience in telecom?" at the TM Forum's recent Digital Transformation World event in Nice. "We didn't have the networking, compute and storage capacity to cope. A lot of the data would be turned off and you would only work on the critical aspects of the data because what you had on the other end of it was humans that could not process such large volumes," noted Bajpay. However, as big data technology has matured, Bajpay and his team at CenturyLink have grappled with the issue and are now leveraging AI to extract more value from their data.

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. A few years ago, Walker and a couple of other firms predicted that customer experience (CX) would become the top brand differentiator by 2020. This gave CIOs a bit of time to plan how to ensure a top-quality customer experience. Based on other research I have seen and conversations with C-level executives, 2020 came early and CX is already the top differentiator.

Many people worry that the development of self-driving technology will put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work. What often gets missed is that self-driving technology companies are going to create plenty of jobs, too. Most obviously, high-end jobs will spring up for engineers designing the necessary hardware and software. But there are also going to be jobs for workers further down the income spectrum, doing things like taking customer calls, cleaning and repairing cars, and updating the high-definition maps that cars use to move around. The Google spinoff plans to launch a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area before the end of the year.