A very short release note issued in July 2020 marked a quiet end to Salesforce’s Einstein Voice Assistant. The end-of-life notice, effective as of July 10, applied to the mobile app for iOS and Android-based smartphones, as well as the “Setup for this feature in Lightning Experience.” The Einstein Voice Assistant was introduced with Salesforce’s characteristic fanfare at Dreamforce 2018. Its relatively quick demise surprised almost nobody with serious plans for voice-based Intelligent Assistants because, upon close investigation, it was a shallow UI that was little more than a conversational skin for existing applications.

In 2018, Einstein Voice Assistant was part of a much more expansive role that Salesforce described for Einstein Voice Services. At the time, Einstein was positioned as a “smart CRM assistant across sales, service, marketing commerce and more.” The expectations were very high. Reality, in the form of commoditization, set in by 2019. It became clear that automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) are mere building blocks that virtually all developers expect to incorporate into their Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). The power shifted to tools and services that simplify the development efforts of enterprise employees, system integrators and business process outsourcers.

The Amazon Connect Connection
As the third quarter of 2020 approaches, Salesforce’s decision to deprecate Einstein Voice Assistant doesn’t mean that it is abandoning its “Voice Rules!” attitude. Quite the contrary. The giant of cloud-based CRM has realized that the future of both Conversational AI and UI reside in the giant of e-commerce’s own service cloud. To be fair, it had explicitly revealed this roadmap at Dreamforce 2019 in this document describing “Hey Einstein” as the wake up word that brings voice search and command-and-control “tailored to any role or industry”, giving every customer or employee his or her own voice guide. Salesforce’s Service Cloud Voice is the foundation for “Hey Einstein”. The tools and pre-configured “Einstein Voice Skills” provide the primitives for an admin or developer to create voice assistants to perform such tasks as updating a field, creating a task or reading out a forecast.

The developers using Salesforce Service Cloud Voice have come to appreciate deep integrations into Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically its a la carte Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Amazon Connect took top billing in anticipation of enterprises’ need for services that combine old-guard voice processing, call processing and NLU/ML with a portfolio of “AI powered speech analytics”, a set of capabilities that included transcription, translation, categorization and sentiment analysis… all included in AWS’ cloud.

Even though we live in a “multi-cloud” world, it is more and more obvious that Amazon Connect is Salesforce’s preferred CCaaS provider. This release makes it clear that, even though Salesforce sees value in providing enterprises with their choice of providers for National Language Processing, Machine Learning and Analytics, AWS has preferred position. In so many words, “Amazon Connect is also providing powerful AI-powered speech analytics, using Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend, to surface sentiment analysis, speed text transcription, and translation into preferred languages, directly to agents through Service Cloud Voice.”

The connection to Einstein is also explicit. “Salesforce Einstein uses information from these real-time transcripts to give the agent recommended answers, contextual knowledge articles, and next best actions for the customer, all within the Service Cloud console. Clearly, AWS has agreed that Salesforce had won the battle for real estate on each agents screen and that Einstein has a role to play as a source of information and advice to agents.

Viewing Customer Data Through Amazon’s Contact Lens
Meanwhile AWS has stepped up development of a new AI-based analytic offering called Contact Lens, designed to provide access to such functions as transcription, insights (key phrases) or redaction with the click of a “check box” in the Amazon Connect Control panel. Instead of having to invoke Amazon Lex (for speech recognition, text-to-speech and NLP) or shopping for individual “Lambda Functions” to carry out specific tasks, Contact Lens combines selected functions to serve specific use cases.

One of the promising use cases that Amazon execs described to us is “call disposition.” It is a horizontal application for post-call processing of transcribed content. Rather than taking up an agents time to compose descriptions of the purpose of a call (usually selecting from a checklist of outcomes), Contact Lens prepares one based on its transcription. It can provide a more accurate account of the topics covered, assurance of compliance with laws, rules and policy, and a listing of any commitements that an agent has made on behalf of the company.

TTEC Acquiring An Amazon Connect Accelerator: VoiceFoundry
As if on cue, one of the longest-standing Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) in the world is acquiring a company that is dedicated to simplifying and speeding Amazon Connect integration for global enterprises. Denver-based TTEC enters an agreement to purchase VoiceFoundry to integrate into its Humanifytm CX Cloud. VoiceFoundry had been part of Waterfield Technologies portfolio of companies. In was among the first communications consultants and integrators to focus on developing personnel, best practices, tools, APIs and connectors specifically to simplify and accelerate migration to Amazon Connect.

Waterfield’s experience with building connectors from enterprise contact centers to AWS goes back more than three years, which means it pre-dates the formal launch of Amazon Connect. It became one of the first Amazon Connect resellers on a global basis and built a staff of designers and consultants responsible for some of the first integrations with Salesforce, ServiceNow, ZenDesk and other popular platforms. It employs a set of migration tools that, according to the TTEC press release, no comprise an enterprise-grade API integration and deployment platform, including Humanify’s intelligent administration, orchestration, analytics, and automation solutions.

Most important is the new path to market and the CRM cloud giant’s role. TTEC’s Humanifytm Cloud will “seamlessly leverage the power of Salesforce’s Service Cloud + Amazon Connect to offer out-of-the-box contact center solutions sold by Salesforce” (the italics are mine).

It’s All About CXaaS and CSA Now
There’s a new competitive landscape emerging in the “CX as a Service” World. Opus Research will be issuing a quick succession of posts about the competitive responses from Genesys (Engage Cloud), Cisco, NICE, Five9 and others. As the focus rightfully moves to resources that speed up delivery of automated Intelligent Assistants that span multiple channels and modes, expect both competition and innovation to come from the Conversational Service Automation (CSA) domain, including Uniphore and Thrio.

The post Salesforce Shuts down Einstein Voice Assistant; Confirms Strong Links to Amazon Connect appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

As we prepare to turn the calendar from one decade to the next, Big Tech looms larger than ever. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The first names that leapt to mind were all tech leaders. And looking through the replies, I was hardly alone.

So my next question was, naturally, which of them could actually become a supervillain?

Here are a few who are either fine or just not quite evil enough to do it: Tim Cook (Apple), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), and Sundar Pichai (Google).

There are others – like former Uber chief Travis Kalanick and ousted WeWork head Adam Neumann – who have yet to prove their longevity.

Mark Zuckerberg gets a dishonorable mention. Facebook has been evil, enabling harassment, violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the spread of fake news in 2016, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and, well, take your pick, really. But for all the stupid things Zuckerberg has done or allowed to happen, it’s just that, bless his heart, he just doesn’t have what it takes to become a supervillain.

He talks about curbing hate speech but then twists himself in knots talking about free speech. He partners with ultra-right-wing outlet Breitbart and then walks face first into getting excoriated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on national television. He careens from one side of an issue to the other so fast, it’s amazing he can keep the lights on at Facebook at all. He’s a bumbling CEO who’s lost control.

In the end, there are three tech leaders that stand at the precipice of supervillainy heading into the 2020s and they’re all three pretty damn powerful.

Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX)

Of the three people on this list, Musk is probably the least likely to become a supervillain. His worst transgressions fall into pretty ho-hum corporate misdeed categories like union-busting, the occasional copyright violation, defamation claims, and smoking weed.

And he’s certainly earned the right to say, “I told you so,” if AI takes over the world.

But Musk could still become a supervillain (maybe controlling the AI!). It’s not hard to imagine him biding his time, waiting for Tesla cars to become more prevalent, and then: BAM.

He takes control of all Teslas on the road. He uses SpaceX to take over President Trump’s Space Force and his ground forces utilize Cybertrucks as tanks. And his army’s weapons? Those flamethrowers, of course. Meanwhile, he uses all his tunnels to move from one base to the other, always evading capture thanks to his Hyperloop trains.

Musk has been sending weird tweets and Baby Yoda memes as a smokescreen all along, laying the groundwork for his takeover.

Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon, founder of Blue Origin)

Admit it: Jeff Bezos was either the first or second person that came to your mind for this list, partly due to his Amazon empire, but also because he physically resembles Lex Luthor.

Depending on the day (or hour), Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world. And yet Amazon workers face horrible working conditions, Amazon has participated in union-busting, and part-time employees at Amazon-owned Whole Foods recently had their benefits cut.

He’s already dumping money by the truck-load into his SpaceX competitor, Blue Origin. And he could pour billions into developing supervillain tech and not make a dent in his savings. And given what’s already out there, that’s a scary thought.

And let’s try not to think about how a supervillain could wield the surveillance capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa or Ring. Or the fact that Bezos and Amazon have already strong-armed Seattle over taxes (not to say anything about that HQ2 mess).

Is Bezos evil? I don’t know. But I do know that Bezos’ stranglehold on our daily lives continues to grow: from Amazon’s retail dominance to its growing influence in entertainment with Prime Video to his ownership of The Washington Post, one of the most storied newspapers in the country.

All we can really judge Bezos on is the available evidence of how he treats people. And, so far, it’s not great.

Is Peter Thiel the tech leader most likely to become a supervillain?

Enough money to fund a dozen armies? Check.

In favor of monopolies? Check.

Holds a position of influence with Facebook? Check.

Is leveraging that position to stop Facebook from fact-checking political ads? Check.

Founded a company that, like Facebook, has become notorious for the way it mines data and tracks people? Check.

Has a relationship with a much-maligned presidential administration that seems intent on limiting the free press? Check.

Once wrote the sentence, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”? Check.

Has a doomsday escape in the far corner of the globe? Check.

Look, I’m not saying Peter Thiel is definitely going to become a supervillain. (I’ve seen what he does to things on the internet that he does not like.)

I’m just saying I disagree with suggestions to the contrary.

That’s all.

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Livongo Members can now connect their smartwatches to the Livongo mobile app to receive real-time Livongo notifications on the surface of their choice enabling Livongo to provide more timely and relevant information to Members and their care teams.

Smartwatches are one of the fastest growing new technologies today and it is estimated that one in six people in the United States own a smartwatch1. These new integrations allow Livongo to offer Members behavioral Health Nudges and health information directly to their smartwatch. In addition, Livongo now offers Members the ability to sync their steps data from their Apple, Fitbit, or Samsung smartwatches with their Livongo app. This data enables Livongo’s AI+AI engine to provide more personalized activity-related insights.

Livongo’s smartwatch integration is the latest example of how the company is applying innovative technology to the Livongo Member experience. In February, Livongo announced that it will leverage Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly to power its voice-enabled cellular blood pressure monitoring system. Two months later, Livongo announced a collaboration with Amazon Alexa to offer its Members the ability to ask any of their Alexa-enabled devices to provide their blood glucose readings and health tips via the new HIPAA-compliant Livongo skill.

Our smartwatch integration allows us to capture information from our Members, add it to our AI+AI engine, and return actionable, personalized, and timely information back to them, said Dr. Jennifer Schneider, M.D., M.S., President of Livongo. By offering another way to access personalized health insights, we are able to more easily influence positive behavior change, which we know can lead to better health.

As part of the new smartwatch integration, Livongo now offers notifications for interactive challenges. These challenges are designed to empower Members to form healthy lifestyle habits that support their diabetes management and other chronic conditions in areas such as nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management, and more. Each challenge lasts five days and is designed to enable sustainable lifestyle behavior changes that are known to drive measurable clinical outcomes by providing Members with specific and achievable goals, tools for tracking progress, and daily educational content. Examples of current challenges include incorporating walking into a daily routine or replacing sugary beverages with water. Livongo is able to anticipate potential barriers that Members might face during their behavior change journey and uses educational content to proactively address those barriers.

We are excited to offer our Members the opportunity to conveniently access valuable health information and Health Nudges using their existing smartwatch devices, said Livongo Chief Product Officer Amar Kendale. As we continue to expand our Applied Health Signals platform, we can use the integration to aggregate more important health data that we can then interpret to better understand the unique needs of our Members.

The post Livongo Integrates with Leading Smartwatches; Delivers Personalized Health Insights to People with Chronic Conditions appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.