Tag: tomato.ai

  • Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024

    Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024

    Analyst: Dr. Doreen Galli

    Photography: Dr. Doreen Galli

    ABSTRACT

    After 2 days of filming, 31 videos and 34 shorts and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2024 ends. CCCLV24 was held in Las Vegas from April 24 and 25. The event was held in the Las Vegas Convention Center South Lower Hall. The event featured 4 theaters with each featuring 6 talks each day for a total of 48 keynote sessions. Attendees witnessed endless examples of how generative AI and deep learning are revolutionizing the Call and Contact Center industry.

    Conference Vibe

    After 2 days of filming, 31 videos and ~30 shorts and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas, CCCLV24, ends. With row after row of exhibits*, the event was made whole by the balanced combination of talks and exhibits. Even better, there was 15 minutes in between the talks so one could catch the exhibits. Furthermore, all theaters  schedules were aligned in the event you wanted to switch theaters as well.

    The short two-day event is definitely mighty and packs a punch with 4 keynote theatres each featuring 6 talks a day for a whopping 48 sessions. That said, there were also 2 keynotes who were to bashful to be taped which is a highly unusual occurrence. Nonetheless, we captured quite a lot of great content in this year’s CCCLV24 playlist. In fact we also spun out over 30 shorts which are at the tail end of the playlist – in case you only want to catch the super good parts!. We were also able to capture a video of the food available. Overall, it seems the Las Vegas Convention Center hits the mark as there were just as many bragging about the food and prices as there were complaining. The Global Voice of Customer Experience, Dennis Wakabayashi, was interviewing on site and even shared his wisdom in a keynote. Fascinating to see how leveraging global call center talent can truly impact the world in which we live.

    Getting Ready for Exciting New Technologies

    Sahni Sanjeev’s keynote by eGain appropriately drove home the requirements for corporate data programs to be mature before attempting to dive into deep learning tools and techniques. A second keynote by Uniphone offered up an Enterprise AI blueprint with some very solid advice. Specifically, your knowledge management system should be used so that the data determines your first actions. One must act based on the customer pain points not the cool technology. Of course if you didn’t get to organize it yet, Robot.AI shared their solution on exhibit. Robot.ai is simply feed all your corporate data then provides a gen AI service to answer questions about all of it.

    A keynote reminder was given that one cannot use newest and greatest AI tools without thought to protect your customers. This keynote was provided by Private AI’s co-founder Patricia Thaine. In her talk, she detailed the various scenarios and considerations one must take to not end up on the news for an embarrassing compromise. It was a true sign of industry maturity to see a product such as Private AI on exhibit this year as well.

    Speaking of protection, a vendor we are familiar with, SecureLogix shared their patented solution to stopping call pumping and TDoS attacks and more. Call pumping wastes an incredible amount of money. During my tenure as a telephony strategist, every public 800 number examined suffered from a call pumping compromise. At one point, 85% of all DDOS attacks had concurrent TDOS attacks- meaning your customers cannot find you on the internet or call you regarding the issue. One modern security concern involves deepfakes, to that end Veridas was on hand with their solution to identify and stop vocal deep fakes!

    Conference Whispers: NAB Show 2024 featured translation and transcription services leveraged in editing and broadcast in a keynote as well as in exhibits. Microsoft featured their solution based on Open AI. TRINT featured their text to speech solution adopted across the industry. You may also recall in Conference Whispers: Adobe Summit we covered Transperfect and their 200 languages. For the first time ever, we found the technology that the UN decided to use expanding a ten-minute demonstration into usage for the entire day’s session. Of course, if their presentations was anything like the one at CCCLV24, we understand. Worldwide Tech Connections does text to text, text to speech, speech to text or speech to speech. They build their own grammar and vocabulary models and parse the entire sentence before translating. Of course, if you only needed a bilingual medical back office, Access Salud was there to help.

    Technologies for Agents

    Awaken’s keynote points out that Agent Experience is your Brand’s experience to your customers. To that end, there were many technologies available to improve Agent experience. You may recall FLOWIT from Conference Whispers: CES 2024 that uses Generative AI over employee satisfaction. They were also featured in an Industry Whispers webinar. CCCLV24 had a similar technology by Centrical focused on improving employee experience.  They focus on creating best-in-class employee experience for frontline agents specifically. evaluagent was on exhibit sharing how their technology can execute deep analysis of the conversation and summarize freeing up their agents.

    For organizations seeking to add AI to their agents and leave it to the agent’s discretion when and how they use AI, then Smile.cx was there for you! If you want to capture all the folklore in your organization and make it available to your agents, ScreenSteps exhibited. If you want to avoid handing agents a 200 page searchable PDF files, Drop Cowboy may have an answer for you. In another exhibit, Reddy.IO has AI for your agents and stated a system setup takes 5 minutes. If your agents have heavy accents make calls frustrating for them to communicate, Tomato.ai who was on stage last year, was on exhibit this year. We also featured Tomato.ai in an Industry Whispers earlier this year.

    Big Profiles was on exhibit to provide intelligent customer profiles that predict certain customer propensities such as churn, purchases, cross sales, and collections. Structurely shared their solution to text or call customers including an AI created voice. Observe.AI can digest all conversations with customers to identify moments of interest. If you would appreciate accurate granular sentiment analysis over all those communications, Sestek and their conversational AI and analytics was on exhibit.

    Technology Customers will enjoy

    If you are an individual who’s number is the Do Not Call registry, you will appreciate DNC’s solution. DNC to assist call centers in respecting the list by scrubbing it for numbers that they should not contact. Meera.ai enables a company to stop annoying customers by maintaining contact cadence for the organization. TNS was one of the many vendors present that can add a telephony identifier, ANI, to wireless outbound calls to the ANI of the company represented. For readers who absolutely despise IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, Talkr.ai shared their technology ready to make your corporate IVR system obsolete.

    If understanding your agent is critical, you will appreciate it if the agent calling has access to Tomato.ai, especially in the event they have a heavy accent. Likewise, if the company your calling is quite popular, you would appreciate if the company you are calling deployed Omilia – able to handle 6 million concurrent calls. If the company you do business with leverages Drop Cowboy, you may just get a custom voicemail. Drop Cowboy leverages deep learning capabilities to generate a voice to customize mass voicemails. Finally, for those of you that just hate filling out surveys after a speaking with a call center, Miarec has you covered. Miarec leveraged conversational intelligences to automatically score a call eliminating the requirement to survey the caller.

    Next Year’s Conference

    Call & Contact Center Expo comes to Las Vegas every year. The next CCCLV will occur April 16 and 17th, 2025, in Las Vegas, NV at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

    *When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.

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    ©2019-2024 TBW Advisors LLC. All rights reserved. TBW, Conference Whispers, Industry Whispers, Vendor Whispers, Technical Business Whispers, Whisper Reports, Whisper Studies, Whisper Ranking and Fact-based Research and Advisory are trademarks or registered trademarks of TBW Advisors LLC. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without TBW’s prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of TBW’s research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, TBW disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information. TBW does not provide legal, or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by the TBW Usage Policy. TBW research is produced independently by its research organization without influence or input from a third party. For further information, see Fact-based research publications on our website for more details.

  • Industry Whispers: Generative AI in Production Lessons Learned

    This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time. 

    Research Code 2036.

    Dr. Doreen Galli has 6 degrees including a Waterloo CS Ph.D. in SIMD data storage and 8 patent held by IBM with 2 more pending at Microsoft. She has led significant and measurable changes at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT and most recently Microsoft where she was the platform architect for Azure and CTO in Azure’s MCIGET. She was trained as an analyst by Gartner where she was recognized as an expert in all things data from ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management and all forms and analytics including sensor data.

    An All-American Athlete Collegiate Runner, Dr. Galli enhanced her formal education with process improvement certifications of Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma, and Pull Thinking, along with Technology and Network Transformation Certifications from AT&T. She is a Top 25 Women on the Web recipient and a published author with over 200 articles. Her first book, “Distributed Operation Systems” was published by Prentice Hall in English and Chinese. Her second book, “Galli’s Keys to Success: Optimize your College Career” is available via online bookstores. Dr. Galli has been an invited speaker at such distinguished venues as Forbes Executive Summit, CIO Summit, CIO Academy, Grace Hopper, Network+ Interop Las Vegas, Gartner’s Catalyst as well as The Internet Security Conference.

    Ofer is the CEO of Tomato.ai, a speech GenAI startup that’s raised $10M to soften accents on calls in real-time. Previously he led a virtual agent startup within Google’s Area 120 incubator, for which he closed >$500M in Call Center AI deals. Prior to that Ofer led and sold a developer tools startup to Google, and an ad network startup to IAC. He holds a MS/BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from Cornell.

    Kevin is Cofounder and CEO of BirchAI, a leader in automating complex workflows in healthcare and other high-compliance call centers. BirchAI is a venture-backed spinout from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, one of the country’s leading AI research organizations.

    Previously in his career, Kevin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, GE Capital, McKinsey & Company’s global healthcare practice, and as an independent consultant across the healthcare sector. He also led business development in healthcare for the Austin-based AI startup, SparkCognition. Outside of work, Kevin cofounded Start Reading Now, a research-based non-profit that addresses Summer Setback and the Achievement Gap by funding thousands of young kids each year to buy their own personal library of 30 new books.

    Kevin was a German and Political Science major at the University of Nebraska, and completed his MBA at the University of Minnesota.

    Stephan Müller is Co-Founder and CTO of FLOWIT, a Swiss HR-Tech Startup. FLOWIT is a GenAI-powered people development platform that drives employee engagement and reduces employee churn.
    Prior to joining FLOWIT, Stephan Müller obtained a Master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Data Science, with a focus on theoretical Data Science and in particular Generative Networks, and worked in AI consulting, completing various project in the space of Recommender Systems and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

    Raika came to the United States when she was 15 years old and received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from California State University Northridge. She started as a junior system engineer and is currently the lead engineer at Livenation/Ticketmaster Information Security.

    Esha Joshi is the cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Yoodli, an AI powered speech coach. Her dream is to help women become more confident communicators so they get the opportunities they deserve. After struggling with public speaking for many years, Esha’s now a fomer Toastmaster speaking champion and Grace Hopper keynote speaker. She’s passionate about helping others become the best communicators they can be. Prior to Yoodli, Esha worked at Apple in engineering and product management capacities to help launch Apple TV+.

  • Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2023

    Conference Whispers: Call & Contact Center Expo Las Vegas 2023

    Analyst: Dr. Doreen Galli

    Published May 1, 2023

    ABSTRACT

    The Call & Contact Center Expo was held in Las Vegas from April 26-27. The conference featured 94 educational sessions across 8 theatres. This two-day packed event featured 94 educational sessions. Attendees witnessed numerous examples of generative AI changing their industry right before their eyes. Finding and securing remote talent were also showcased. Unfortunately, the conference organizers were unable to provide any attendance or show metrics by the time of press; they are in the unique position of being the only conference to fail in this regard.

    Conference Vibe

    The Call & Contact Center Expo was best described as short and sweet and to the point. There were eight presentation theaters with constant sessions during the two-day expo held in the Las Vegas Convention Center South Upper Hall. Each day featured a Vegas 10am start and ended by 4pm so conversations could continue through offsite business dinners. Exhibitors considered it a successful conference and were pleased with those in attendance. Some attendees represented start-ups looking to decide on a solution. There were a surprising number of outsourcers also looking to acquire technology for their customers. Overall, attendees were delighted at the plethora of generative AI sessions.

    Advancements in Generative AI: Key insights and best practices

    The Call & Contact Center Expo showcased significant advancements in generative AI. Several key insights emerged regarding the application of generative AI for call centers. First generative AI or AI based on large language models (LLM), is already being successfully deployed in production. Birch.ai demonstrated how their technology is used to summarize complex after call work (1). SliceX.ai showcased their solution which can readily summarize content out of the box (2). Tomato.ai demonstrated their solution that remarkably changes the accent of contact center worker (3).

    Second, generative AI works best when combined with human agents conversational AI, and remote process automation. As noted by Thrio, it took 77 years for the telephone to get 100 million users and 16 years for mobile phones, whereas Chat GPT only took two months. Effective utilization of generative AI requires integrating it with remote process automation, connecting the new tool with human agents and other technologies (4). Typically, the process involves pre-filtering data to remove personal identifiable information (PII) then applying generative AI. Finally conversational AI or similar technologies are then deployed to remove hallucinations – when generates incorrect or baseless claims. Laivly emphasized the importance of combining generative AI and human agents (5). Kore.ai improved poorly trained agent performance through generative and conversational AI (6). Smartbots.ai discussed the deployment journey depending on your legacy technologies in place and willingness to jump into new solutions (7). Openstream.ai which built their business on conversational AI, expressed some caution, and warned of the potential risks associated with this emerging technology (8). Fiber.ai had a new product for automated customer support leveraging AI and was seeking customers (9). Finally, Talon displayed their browser based on Chrome that can ensure the wrong data doesn’t get entered on web based generative AI solutions. (10).

    Finding and Securing Remote Workers

    During the pandemic, contact centers faced significant challenges and underwent major changes. Finding and retaining talent became a crucial task for the industry. Scalepex highlighted the advantages of tapping into the talent pool in Mexico (11). Google emphasized the benefits of ChromeOS for remote and on-site call center employees during their presentation (12).

    Addressing the concerns surrounding cybersecurity in the context of remote work, Pentamix delved into the topic (13). They shed light on the importance of securing the remote workforce and ensuring data protection. Additionally, Magnitech discussed the significance of training staff in both onsite and remote environments, emphasizing the need for cybersecurity awareness (14).

    In response to the increasing need for endpoint security, Watchguard presented their solution (15), offering a comprehensive approach to safeguarding endpoints and protecting sensitive information.

    Overall, these presentations and discussions at the conference provided valuable insights into talent acquisition, technology adoption, cybersecurity, and endpoint security in the evolving landscape of contact centers.

    Citations

    1. https://youtu.be/tHNF5wgh-5k
    2. https://youtu.be/2P7jsQ304B0
    3. https://youtu.be/KKt0ovf6MNY
    4. https://youtu.be/TMUg90OSrtE  
    5. https://youtu.be/45CwV4cJcrY   
    6. https://youtu.be/118azbGDmqU
    7. https://youtu.be/lAgN1LW76QQ  
    8. https://youtu.be/9Xkjqc03Xlg
    9. https://youtu.be/0vhI5DacQmI
    10. https://youtu.be/bpunVddukro
    11. https://youtu.be/u9GmSS3r96s
    12. https://youtu.be/Kl66fES8yDk
    13. https://youtu.be/edSloMJ1hOw
    14. https://youtu.be/N4rd6g_KCp0
    15. https://youtu.be/3ixavDXVNmI

    *When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.

    Corporate Headquarters

    2884 Grand Helios Way

    Henderson, NV 89052                                                    

    ©2019-2023 TBW Advisors LLC. All rights reserved. TBW, Conference Whispers, Technical Business Whispers, Whisper Reports, Whisper Studies, Whisper Ranking and Fact-based Research and Advisory are trademarks or registered trademarks of TBW Advisors LLC. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without TBW’s prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of TBW’s research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, TBW disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information. TBW does not provide legal, or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by the TBW Usage Policy. TBW research is produced independently by its research organization without influence or input from a third party. For further information, see Fact-based research publications on our website for more details.