Get Ready: Voice Assistants Are Coming to Your Conference Room
Once trapped inside smartphones, voice assistants are now finding new homes in different form factors. Voice assistants are digital assistants that use voice recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language processing (NLP) to power smart speakers and control smart home appliances. They can also help users dictate messages, manage tasks, and set appointments. Voice assistants are the hands-free computing interface for the future, but are we ready to have them listen in on our phone calls and meetings? If that feels "creepy," then you'll need to get over it because the voice assistant is an idea whose time has come.
Gartner Research predicts that, by 2021, 25 percent of digital workers will use virtual assistants on a daily basis; this is up from just 2 percent in 2019. For small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and startups, this means an opportunity to use a virtual assistant technology to take care of more repetitive and auxiliary businesses processes, which, according to vendors anyway, will give those customers more time to attend to the day-to-day.
AI for Meetings, Conference Calls
When it comes to meetings and conference calls, distraction is a common problem because it causes dwindling engagement and retention from participants. You might expect that in your monthly revenue review meeting, but it's not something you want when you're talking to customers or planning important new initiatives.
This is where voice collaboration technology providers such as Voicea think they can make a difference. For example, Voicea's Enterprise Voice Assistant (EVA) is designed to boost productivity in meetings and conference calls. EVA will listen in on a meeting or call, take notes, and set reminders so participants can spend less energy on note taking and more on concentrating on the discussion.
A solution such as EVA can take something intangible like a conference call and quantify it into notes, deliverables, and even assigned tasks and action items. "EVA can track and label as many of the speakers as there are in a meeting," said Cory Treffiletti, Chief Marketing Officer at Voicea.
The voice assistant also works with popular online video conferencing and meeting solutions, including Bluejeans, Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Skype for Business, and Zoom.
"EVA joins meetings, listens, and transcribes the conversations," explained Mohamed El-Geish, Chief Architect at Voicea. "Artificial intelligence is applied in a plethora of ways: an Automatic Speech Recognition [or ASR] system for transcription, a KeyWord Spotting [or KWS] system to respond when users say, 'Okay EVA'; an intent-detection system for understanding voice commands, search in audio, and predictive models to recommend important moments in the meeting [such as personalized highlights and word clouds]."
Not Your Smartphone's Voice Assistant
Voice assistants for the workplace are different in character and design from the ones in your smartphones, smart speakers, and smart home appliances. Consumer-focused voice assistants build around their friendly personalities and their ability to inform and entertain. They're always listening for their trigger words, and they can be overbearing and silly.
Productivity-focused voice assistants have more muted personalities. They're trying to help users avoid distractions, after all, not add them. EVA audibly confirms it has fulfilled a demand without trying to strike up a conversation. This is because the goal is to provide a service and not interrupt the conversation, according to Treffiletti.
"Siri and Alexa have to engage in a way that EVA does not," he said, "because EVA is providing a service that is focused on the conversion of a meeting to become a valuable piece of content for you and your team."
Improving Meetings With Voice Analytics
Within an hour after the meeting or conference call, EVA emails participants a report of the meeting, including some highlights, and even a word cloud composed of the most-spoken keywords during the meeting. EVA parses the transcribed meeting content into various items.
"Voice assistant technology is an easy way to improve the meeting experience, manage and track content, and augment engagement with in-room technology," explains Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. "Whether starting a presentation, emailing the notes, or just dimming the lights, using your voice is the most natural and simple way to accomplish these tasks."
Another key feature of EVA is the ability to work with project management apps. Using voice commands, users can have EVA create a task in apps like Asana, Jira Service Desk, and Trello to help them remember important action items and follow-ups from a meeting.
Seeing Voice Assistants as Productivity Hubs
In the future, business voice assistants could serve as hubs to various services, just like how consumer voice assistants today serve as hubs for dimming the lights, playing music, and setting alarms. We can expect productivity-focused business voice assistants to integrate and automate processes.
Looking at voice-powered business solutions, there are various companies that already have the technology in place make voice assistants in the boardroom more ubiquitous. "I'm bullish on Cisco and Microsoft," Newman said. "For Cisco, they have built out their Webex Teams platform, along with their Teams Board solution, to truly bring in room collaboration with a focus on using voice and video to go beyond the room. I also see Microsoft, with Cortana becoming a more significant player. With more than a billion Microsoft Office 365 users, they still own productivity tools. I see this as a natural extension for them."
Removing Barriers to Adoption
While it seems that voice assistant technology is ripe for business adoption, there are still a lot of barriers—both actual and perceived—to bringing it into many workplaces. For one, people who have had poor user experiences with smart speakers or voice assistants in their smartphones, adopting similar technology in the workplace might be a hard sell. There have been instances where consumer voice assistants, like Amazon's Alexa in their Echo speakers, recorded a private conversation and sent it to a contact without authorization. Then there's the creepiness factor of having thousands of employees listening to commands and conversations from users' smart speakers, to ostensibly improve accuracy in voice recognition.
In the case of a voice assistant like EVA, whatever is recorded and transcribed is available only to meeting participants and mostly under the control of the meeting organizer. The same limitations affecting most consumer-oriented voice-based technology applies to business-oriented voice assistants. For example, the source audio needs to be loud and clear enough to properly be deciphered by the AI. There are various nuances, like foreign accents and regional slang words, that could trip up voice assistants, especially in a crowded conference room. This could result in transcripts that are out of context or unreadable. This is where machine learning (ML) can make a difference.
"Voicea's assistant is constantly being trained on accents, pronunciation, and what we call 'out of vocabulary' words. The more you have EVA in your meetings, the more EVA can learn," Treffiletti said. "We operate a five-layer Automatic Speech Recognition [or ASR] platform where each layer is trained on different aspects of audio transcription. Within each of these, we work with languages, accents, and vocabulary in addition to audio quality and other elements that further improve the results of the platform."
Addressing Security and Privacy Concerns
Technical hurdles aside, how do workers feel about sharing meetings and conference calls with an ubiquitous speech-recording robot? With increased importance given to privacy and security, employees might see being recorded as a breach of privacy. In Voicea's case, the recorded and transcribed content is encrypted and accessible only to the people in the meeting. There is also an "Off the Record" command which pauses all recording and transcribing activity.
"The biggest hurdle we see is simply creating a habit," Trefiletti explained. "Most of our users are comfortable with the idea of having an AI on the call, especially since Voicea demonstrates full transparency of having the assistant on the call with pre-meeting email notifications and in-meeting alerts." He added that meeting attendees using EVA aren't worried about privacy concerns because they understand the benefit of having a meeting become a piece of content for use later.
Complementing Jobs, Not Replacing Them
As for the notion that AI and virtual assistants will take jobs away from humans, EVA and similar solutions are task-focused and designed to complement rather than replace people at their jobs. "AI and robots will take jobs that require little to no special skills," Newman noted.
"We don't see people worrying about job replacement as most meetings do not have a person who is solely dedicated to note taking and follow-up; this is a task shared by a number of people in the meeting," Treffiletti said.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.