No Jitter Roll: Speech-to-Text, Comms APIsNo Jitter Roll: Speech-to-Text, Comms APIs

In this week’s No Jitter Roll, we share recent activity on speech-to-text advancements, drag-and-drop communications workflows, customer engagement, and business headsets.

Google Strengthens Speech-to-Text

Google Cloud this week announced new features, models, and languages for its speech-to-text transcription API.

Updates include:

• Support for seven additional languages – Burmese, Estonian, Uzbek, Punjabi, Albanian, Macedonian, and Mongolian

• Enhanced telephony model expansion to three new locales – U.K. English, Russian, and U.S. Spanish

• Boost-based speech adaptation – provides granular control over how much to influence a speech model toward a company’s most important terms; available in 68 new locales

• Speaker diarization – ability to automate attribution of individual words and sentences to different speakers in an audio file; available in 10 new locales

• Automatic punctuation in 18 new locales – tools to improve transcript readability

Vonage Partners on Comms Workflows

Cloud communications provider Vonage last week announced that it has partnered with workflow platform company Whispir. Through this partnership, Whispir is leveraging Vonage’s voice, video, and messaging APIs to give customers the ability to manage, automate, and optimize communications processes. In particular, businesses will be able to use Whispir’s drag-and-drag workflow templates to use Vonage SMS, WhatsApp, and video service APIs to enable more personal and seamless interactions with customers. With Whispir’s platform, businesses have the ability to reduce client application development times without requiring technology aficionados.

Voximplant Automates Call Campaigns

Similarly, CPaaS provider Voximplant this week announced Voximplant Kit – formerly known as Smartcalls . This no-code, AI-powered drag-and-drop customer experience automation solution, lets users sign up, create, and test an inbound or outbound call campaign (or smart IVR) in minutes – without the need to train staff, Voximplant said.

The kit’s speech synthesis supports 120 different voice options, including voices powered by Google Wavenet. And, it enables real-time voice translations for more than 80 languages and interfaces with Google’s Dialogflow for adding virtual, bot-based agents, the company said.

The kit is available now in all subscription plans: Explorer, Startup, Business, and Large Business.

LogMeIn Adds Bold360 Features

SaaS providerLogMeIn continues to enhance its AI-powered customer engagement suite – Bold360 – with newly announced features aimed aiding businesses to boost customer experience, improve agent performance, and increase operational efficiency. New to Bold360 are:

• Dynamic Customer Information Card – allows agents to see more real-time customer activity, like shopping cart, so they can deliver a solution before a customer explains the problem

• Agent Statistics – provides insight on CSAT and other key metrics) directly in an agent’s workspace

• Visitor Blocking – agents can halt interactions with customers that conduct themselves inappropriately and removes distractions that interfere with the customer resolution experience

These features are currently available. 

EPOS Releases Wireless Headset Line

Audio and video solution provider EPOS this week unveiled its EPOS | Sennheiser line of wireless headsets. The portfolio features:

• Adapt 360 — a base headset, available in black and white

• Adapt 400 — an over-the-ear neckband headset, which subtly vibrates for incoming calls and other notifications

• Adapt 560 — a headset with two built-in microphones

• Adapt 660 — features AI-based voice pick up and works with Alexa

All headsets feature active noise cancellation and are undergoing Microsoft Teams certification.

The Adapt 360, 400, 560, and 660 are available for $269, $329, $329, and $439, respectively, according to EPOS.

Ryan Daily, No Jitter associate editor, contributed to this article.