Artificial Intelligence and Unified Collaboration: Some New Ideas
I need a "parallel mind" to help make some decisions for me. Then I can save time, increase my productivity, avoid mistakes, and have good and concise insights into the areas I’m interested in. I can make faster personal and business decisions. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) must address user needs. So, what are the communication needs of an individual in the daily business where AI can help?
Whenever I think about unified communications and end users, I always struggle to find a way to identify and investigate all the needs that a person using our Unify products may have.
OpenScape Business is a well-established product in the Small and Medium Enterprise area as it offers a rich set of telephony and unified communication features in an all-in-one solution. Apart from starting a conference, divert a call to another destination or initiate a callback, it is possible to use a UC app from your mobile or your desktop or even embedded into your mail client and watch your past calls, change your presence, leave a note, chat, record a call and many other features that improve our daily work-life. How can all these offerings assist in different business areas?
If one thinks about the different variants that the telecommunications sector provides, she may be overwhelmed by the complexity of anticipating user needs. What are the needs of a tourist office that conducts 99% of their business through external calls? What areas can provide help to an employee at an international company working in a remote branch? And, how do the two mentioned examples converge for a solution supporting a remote, field worker? These were only some cases that came to my mind. Finding the right unified communication solution is a challenge that all of us may ultimately have.
Going vertical (by your own industry) is easy to say, but difficult to apply. I thought that I can contribute just a bit to the community with some small ideas that incorporate artificial intelligence to help out some of the users that need assistance and know-how to overcome their daily communication issues and become more productive.
“Ad hoc propose favorites”
As a user when I launched my first UC application from OpenScape Business, I observed a tab called Favorites! I was so excited that I could start adding my best contacts to that list. It even had a grouping capability. Then, that was it.
After one year, the same Favorites items and Groups were still there, although in the meantime I had changed various communication channels and persons. The reason is that I never went to the trouble of updating my list. What a nice feature would be to have my ‘favorites’ list updated dynamically, without me intervening manually to it. Then it would be possible for me to do my work more efficiently because I wouldn’t be needing searching my current contacts to add them in the favorites list or deleting the not needed ones.
Automatically classify a call
There are so many instances that I talk with co-workers several times per day or per week. However sometimes the call is not always work-related, or it is not that important. For instance, I have worked with one colleague for more than fifteen years on the same product line. We have therefore many calls during the day that are not job-related and I don’t necessarily need to see them in my Call Journal because they don’t offer me any added value. It would be nice that these kinds of calls are grouped in a different list automatically, so I can then see a view of call history that makes sense to me.
Automatically group calls by topic
Whenever I look at my Call Journal, I see many calls that were made during the day for different reasons. I may talk in the morning about one topic, then speak with another caller about a second topic, then a callback call came about the first topic again and so forth. An interesting and productive idea would be to be able to group calls automatically using AI, based on the topic of discussion so I can have a logical and intelligent calls order in my call history.
Conclusion
Once, Confucius said: ‘Study the past if you want to define the future’. Guess what? AI does this for us! It offers a great opportunity for unified communications to be more attractive, as all benefits help users be more efficient or communicate more effectively.
