Significant improvements to AI technology in recent years have prompted many organisations to consider how it can be applied to their product offering.
Within the unified communication and collaboration industry, AI already plays a key role in features such as automatic captions or transcribing video calls.
Many vendors in the UC & C space have highlighted the growth of AI as a key trend for 2023, something which has been spurred on by Microsoft and Google entering an “arms race” to be the dominant player in the AI field.
With our latest Round Table topic, “Improving Video Engagement With AI”, we spoke with executives from Vbrick, RingCentral, and Vonage to look at how AI can enhance video collaboration, the challenges vendors face, and what upcoming trends they are seeing.
How do you use AI to enhance video collaboration’s quality, efficiency, and engagement?
Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick
“Video offers an extremely efficient and engaging way to transfer knowledge, communicate, conduct training sessions, and more. But when employees are unable to access video content due to language barriers, or simply not being able to find the relevant info, the benefits are lost.
“Vbrick’s video AI technology unlocks the value that oftentimes gets trapped in a company’s video library.
“Using facial recognition, machine transcription, and real-time translation, we are able to enrich video content with information about who appears in the video and what’s being said, while translating live video subtitles and transcripts into over 48 languages and on-demand content into over 61 languages.
“This allows employees to easily search for relevant video content while breaking down comprehension barriers and improving accessibility for all.”
Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral
“RingCentral is tapping into the power of AI to address key challenges that are prevalent across every industry, every business size, every department – globally.
“Automating repetitive tasks: RingCentral’s AI-powered conversation intelligence automates repetitive and menial tasks to free up time to focus on more complex and strategic work.
“Predictive analytics and business insights: RingCentral provides AI to help organizations analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and predict future outcomes.
“Personalization: RingCentral’s AI analyzes mountains of unstructured data to create personalized recommendations, such as soft skills sales coaching.
“Fraud and spam detection: With proprietary spam detection AI and integrations with powerful AI technologies, RingCentral helps organizations avoid significant financial consequences and spam calls.
“Customer service: AI-powered chatbots and real-time guidance enable instant assistance and help organizations improve first-touch resolutions, customer satisfaction, and retention.
“Quality control: RingCentral has powerful AI noise reduction to minimize disruptions across meetings and calls.”
Amitha Pulijala, Vice President of Product, AI, Video, and Platform Services, Vonage
“AI is shaping the collaboration space by making video calls more engaging. At Vonage, we are leveraging AI/ML in our Vonage Meetings video conferencing solution and via the Vonage Video API to enhance the video engagement for our customers with features such as Background Blur/Background removal, background filters, voice transcription/ live captions, light correction and noise cancellation.
“We have seen AI in video engagement increase participant engagement in many use cases and across industries, including
education and healthcare, among others. Depending on how the AI features are implemented, AI media processing is done on the client side for a better client experience.
“For features such as background filters, the quality of the feature depends on the device. If customers use devices with good processing capacity, they will have superior video engagement experiences when they turn on these AI features.
“In addition to out-of-the-box AI features, Vonage also provides AI connectors to third-party AI tools via the Vonage Video API which provides customers with the ability to integrate with a wide variety of AI features from different vendors in the video engagement.
“Vonage also provides media processing ML libraries for developers to apply their own custom video transformation in their real-time video applications (especially useful to build video transformations in AR/VR environments).”
What are some of AI’s current challenges or limitations in video collaboration, and how do you overcome them?
Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral
“Some of AI’s current challenges typically lie around confidence in accuracy levels typically. The great news is that AI leverages machine learning to continue to improve and better process large amounts of information – much more accurately.
“We’re seeing a much wider acceptance of AI and love how ChatGPT is driving broader interest in AI applications.
“Through AI, we address one of the main challenges for hybrid employees: meeting overload. Our AI-generated meeting insights and summaries help users tame their meetings and feel less guilty or behind if a meeting is missed.
“The summaries are available in multiple formats to adapt to the users’ needs: video highlight reel, cliff notes, full transcript.”
Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick
“While technologies like transcription and translation have improved by leaps and bounds, they’re not perfect and they’re not going to recognize internal corporate jargon and acronyms.
“We add a human-in-the-loop in two areas to help improve caption quality.
“The first is to allow our customers to define the names of speakers, products, business units or acronyms in advance. That allows us to train the transcription algorithm to recognize those terms and even whether they should be capitalized.
“We also let our customers edit those captions to ensure the highest possible quality while using AI to do the lion’s share of the work.”
What are some of AI’s emerging trends or opportunities in video collaboration, and how do you leverage them?
Amitha Pulijala, Vice President of Product, AI, Video, and Platform Services, Vonage
“Video indexing is a feature with a lot of potential as you can search the video and create meaningful content out of it, like generating summaries, a useful feature in healthcare and education, generating educational content from training videos, creating content in different languages etc.”
Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick
“Trending globalization, improving accessibility, and an increasing focus on diversity and inclusion initiatives continue to drive requirements to offer additional AI capabilities for video content.
“We believe there is a wealth of untapped knowledge in videos across the enterprise, whether it’s in live events, recorded meetings, or help resources; and, we want to make these assets extremely discoverable.
“While Vbrick already offers AI-powered transcription and translation, we believe there’s more to do in helping people consume audio in their native tongue through audio translation, audio description, and ASL support for video content.
“Expanding these capabilities will be a priority for Vbrick in the year ahead.
Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral
“In the near future, AI is becoming a tool that is going to help people make sense of mountains of unstructured data, such as voice calls, video meetings, and more – at scale.
“This means that organizations will have access to information that they never had access to and will be able to provide powerful insights on making timely business decisions.
“AI technology is evolving fast, and we are continuously finding ways to leverage it to improve the whole video collaboration experience: before, during and after meetings – in addition to all the different ways we communicate across a continuum.
“Companies should also keep an eye on the use of video to improve customer experience. Agents and customers can elevate conversations from real-time messaging into video conversations to solve problems in real time. By providing more context, AI can help in this process.”
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