It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

Continue reading "The Twelve Days of Unified Communications – Q1 Update" »

Back in February I blogged about my mediocre customer service story with CapitolOne, and their egregiously bad use of speech recognition, coupled with lack of CTI into their contact center. However, things aren’t all bad in contact center land as I just had a quite opposite and stellar experience when I called Replacements Ltd.

Continue reading "A Contact Center Using CTI Makes for One Happy Caller" »

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing on Dimension Data. For whatever reason, prior to Cisco’s UC summit last fall I hadn’t paid much attention to Dimension Data, but since sitting in on that presentation, I’ve been keenly interested in what they do and their business model.

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We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.

Continue reading "Active Voice SPEAK – Speech-enabled Auto Attendant for the SMB Masses" »

It took a long time, but Intervoice has finally merged their enterprise and network platforms into one, both from a solutions and philosophy standpoint. That is one of the key takeaways that I got from having attended the Intervoice industry analyst event in DC this week. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal but it is when you consider that it completes a transition born out of a) moving to a software and services company from one that a decade ago was proprietary down to the board level, b) melding two very different businesses – service provider and enterprise, c) completing the integration of some big acquisitions – namely Brite, Edify, and Nuasis d) blending together contact center, self-service (IVR), messaging and notification onto the same platform.

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At CTIA Wireless yesterday Yahoo Inc. announced a collaboration with speech start-up Vlingo in which Vlingo will provide the speech recognition to compliment Yahoo’s oneSearch search technology for mobile phone applications. Marco Boerries, EVP of Yahoo’s Connected life division; the one that focuses on mobile products, did a demo of the new Yahoo! oneSearch at CTIA, by asking the application where is the best play to play craps in Las Vegas.

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This really is a story about audio conferencing and a meeting I had with Wyde Voice at the VON conference in San Jose yesterday. Unfortunately, its not about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, although that is pretty much what I had for lunch at the show with back to back vendor meetings (bless those vendor candy bowls). In any case, there were a number of great technical tidbits that Wyde offered up about their new wideband audio conferencing technology, but the one that grabbed me the most, that I’ll talk about first, is that they will be offering voice verification as part of audio conferencing, and this is something I haven’t seen or heard about before. Being the speech girl that I am, I like it. It’s like combining peanut butter and chocolate.

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