From background noise suppression and echo cancellation, to voice and facial recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has made huge advances enhancing the convenience and quality of communications in the workplace, writes Richard Middleton, Country Manager of UK and Ireland at Lifesize
The next frontier will be how AI can support decision making by simplifying the way we aggregate valuable information that comes from any type of call, whether it’s video or VOIP. This will not only increase efficiency but expedite the discovery of problems and solutions.
It means the days of recording calls “for quality assurance and training purposes only” are over. Instead, AI can now expose rich insights and data collected from the voice recording, in real-time that will allow a call handler to offer more relevant and immediate advice.
These AI enabled technologies are also being replicated in the workplace. By letting software crunch the entirety of raw content, artificially intelligent devices have the potential to not only learn what is worth transcribing, but also learn who is speaking and when. It means participants in a meeting can rely on a transcription to cut through the small talk, and only record pertinent points and notable actions.
AI in Communication
AI will also have the power to automatically assign people tasks and send notifications to meeting members on things like elapsed time and who is present and participating.
It’s not just meeting participants who stand to benefit from AI. Frost & Sullivan talks about how AI can bring more reliability into the meeting room. By performing predictive analytics in the meeting room, IT can proactively monitor networks and endpoints, scan for performance anomalies and take corrective actions before users are affected in the meeting room.
Ultimately, AI-driven devices can make your conference rooms smarter and your meetings better in ways that you might never have imagined – and we see this imagination coming to life in 2019.
Forget making our lives easier, what if AI could give us the answers?
They say the ground-breaking moment will be when a machine is able to crack the concept of humour. In other words, when AI is able to identify hidden meanings, double entendre and irony based on historical context. In practical terms that means AI will be able to draw a connection between potential challenges and the overall goal through the study of previous projects or the analysis of previous conference calls. What we predict for 2019 is AI not only continuing to make our lives easier, but supporting us with practical recommendations and solutions.
