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“Productivity gains and revenue increases are the biggest ROI for voice technology.” - Deepgram

This is one of the main findings of Opus Research’s 2022 study on the State of Voice Technology, based on a survey of 400 decision makers. Some other key take-aways:

• Customer experience is the number one reason to use voice technology.

• 92% of respondents thought that widespread use of voice-enabled experiences is less than five years away.

• 75% of respondents expect to increase spending on speech technology solutions in the next 12 months.

Is voice search optimization the new SEO? - Voice Crunch

It depends what you mean by that. Traditional SEO is still incredibly important and is not going away anytime soon. On the other hand, with 27% of the online global population using voice search on mobile already in 2018 (Source: Google), voice searches are definitely something to keep in mind when building your website and webpages. 

Hands-free in the OR - Voice Crunch

One of the spaces where voice technology has been making major steps is certainly the healthcare sector. Some signs that there’s interest in the market:

• Last year, Microsoft finalized the $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communication, the speech-recognition firm already employed by over 90% US hospitals today.

• Suki.ai, an AI-powered voice platform that health care professionals use to generate medical notes and reduce administration, has raised $55 million in a series C round of funding.

• In december, Oracle has announced plans to acquire one of the leading EHR systems Cerner for $28.3 billion.

Something more filling 🍲

“+14% increase in top-line sales” - Voicebot.ai

Big claim for many brands in COVID times. But it’s the claim Salesfloor is betting on, acquiring the conversational commerce startup Automat that promises such an increase.

How will they achieve this? Rethinking the way conversational AI can support a shopping platform. Instead of automating customer service teams, Automat scales live store associate teams. The AI will guide customers through products from brands as varied as L’Oréal and Colgate-Palmolive, make recommendations and take them to personalized websites after the purchase. 

Customers want customer care to show care... - McKinsey & Company

Duh, right? In a lot of cases, that still seems like too much to ask.

Lucky us, in 2022 businesses are getting better at analyzing contact-center operations and working on better managing unstructured voice data to spell out where things go wrong. Analyzing speech data from these conversations, through natural language processing and artificial-intelligence-based systems, can lead to very powerful and original customer experience insights.

… just like employee support should support employees - Venture Beat

The sudden shift to remote working in 2020 precipitated a pretty heavy rewiring for most companies in the world. Organizations, especially the ones that were able to make the switch more deftly, were required to guide their workers through these changes. Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks was certainly not going to leave the crucial task of employee support to the case. 

They turned to Moveworks to develop a conversational AI system that would provide personalized and friction-free IT help, HR help, and more. Sheldon, the chatbot, proved very successful: “over 90% of employees now use [it] on a regular basis. And over 4,000 issues are solved by Sheldon completely autonomously end-to-end, saving Palo Alto Networks over 180,000 hours of productivity,” the founder reported. 

A voice from the grave - Rain Agency

Chef Anthony Bourdain’s synthetic voice starring in the 2021 Roadrunner documentary about his life has brought onto the table once again the ethical question of voice synthesis: creepy, cool or both?

Is AI a cyberthreat or the key to cybersecurity? - LinkedIn

We often hear conversations about AI center around the privacy threats the technology poses. But, what if, we started looking at it as the solution rather than the problem?

On LinkedIn we talked about the case of Concentric, leader in the AI-based cybersecurity sector. Let us know what you think on there.

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