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Dubber Corporation Ltd (ASX: DUB) (Dubber or the Company) is pleased to announce the appointment of Neil Wilson as Chair effective today.

Neil is an experienced business leader and entrepreneur with corporate, start-up, founder and public company experience. He holds a Bachelor of Business degree and is a CPA and Member of the Australian Computer Society.

Neil is a practitioner in the digital and technology domain and has extensive experience in general management and CEO management across private and public company scenarios.

He held the position of Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Oakton Limited (ASX:OKN), until its acquisition by Dimension Data in 2014. He completed a three-year term as the CEO of the Victoria Racing Club (VRC) and has been the VRC Chairman since November 2020.

Neil is currently Chairman of Nexon, a non-executive director of ASX-listed Knosys Limited and a member of Advisory Boards for several private technology and digital companies. He continues to be a regular keynote speaker at industry and investor forums and presents to boards and executive committees on digital and technology directions and the value of a data and an information focus.

Following Neil’s appointment by the Board, Peter Clare steps down as Chairman and has resigned as a director, effective 28 February 2023.

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber: “The Dubber team is excited to have Neil Wilson join the Company as Chair. Neil brings with him an expert insight into the sector which will be pivotal to Dubber’s aspirations for digital data transformation.

“We would also like to thank Peter Clare who has been Chair for over 5 years. During his tenure Peter oversaw the transition from a small business into a globally recognized leader in its field. We wish Peter well in pursuit of his many other interests.”

Neil Wilson commented: “Dubber is a great example of a next generation company in the digital and data sector. The local and global opportunities are immense, and I am privileged to be joining the company at this stage of its evolution.”

Mr Wilson has agreed to be remunerated for this role partly in cash and partly in equity. Accordingly, subject to shareholder approval, he will be invited to participate in the Company’s equity incentive scheme and be granted the following securities subject to the Company’s equity incentive scheme rules:

311,084 zero exercise price options; and 600,000 “Remuneration Options” exercisable at $0.50 each on or before 31 July 2027 vesting equally (ie 200,000 options on each occasion) on achievement of share price targets of $0.75, $1.00 and $1.50
(calculated using a rolling 20 day VWAP of Company’s shares traded on ASX).

This announcement has been approved for release to ASX by the Board of Directors.

During 2022, Senior researchers at the Dubber AI Centre of Excellence, worked with leading university groups to co-supervise student projects and internships across Honours, Masters and PhD levels.

“We’re proud to be helping foster emerging talent in speech and language AI in Australia by partnering with local universities.  These connections are a great way for us to keep track of the latest academic advances, while giving students the opportunity to work on problems with practical applications.” Dr Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber

“The School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications is pleased to be partnering with innovative Australian industry partners like Dubber to develop new digital signal processing and machine learning capability. These honours thesis topics jointly supervised by Dubber experts provide invaluable workplace-relevant skill development for UNSW Engineering students, and build industry-university collaboration” Professor Julien Epps, Head of School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW

The projects showcased a range of innovative conversational AI initiatives. As we look forward to welcoming a new cohort in 2023, here is a summary of the projects we enjoyed supporting in 2022:

Darshana Madduma – PhD Internship

University: Professor Sridha Sridharan, QUT.

Title: Evaluation of the Applicability of Audio Transformer Networks for Speaker Diarization.

Darshana investigated how emerging pre-trained general acoustic models can be applied to multiple end tasks, with an initial focus on automatically segmenting speaker turns in conversations.  These models have the promise of increased accuracy while sharing computational resources across different tasks.

Jack Murray – Honours Project

University: Dr Vidhyasaharan Sethu, UNSW

Title: Modern Speech Representation Frameworks for Spoken Language Identification and Segmentation

As speech technologies advance, we face the problem of providing equal access to multilingual speakers, and speakers of less common languages. Some issues with existing systems are that they often support only one language at a time and are usually trained using thousands of hours of labelled data. For less common languages, these large, labelled datasets often don’t exist. Jack’s project implemented a language segmentation algorithm trained on a minimal amount of data by leveraging pre-trained general acoustic models. This could form the basis of a system to segment and transcribe conversations that contain multiple languages.

“It was great having Dubber AI experts supporting my project.  Not only did I learn a lot more than I would have on my own, but it was also really motivating to see practical applications of this type of research”

Jack recently came second (out of around 200 entries) in EE&T’s Thesis Poster Competition, as judged by industry, alumni and academics. Congratulations, Jack!

Pavithra Bharatham Rengarajan – Masters Project

University:Dr Lingqiao Liu, University of Adelaide (AIML)

Title: Unsupervised Dialogue Segmentation with Next Sentence Prediction

Automatic segmentation of a conversation into topics is a key task towards effective presentation or summarisation of meetings.  This is a difficult problem however, and large annotated datasets for this task are not readily available. Pavithra’s project focused on unsupervised techniques that could be used with limited data.  The most promising approach used Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) from the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to identify the change of context or direction of a conversation transcript.

Madeline Younes – Honours Project

University: Associate Professor Beena Ahmed, UNSW

Title: Exploring Transfer Learning for Arabic Dialect Identification

The goal of Madeline’s project was to automatically distinguish between different spoken Arabic dialects to help improve transcription accuracy.  Given there are scarce data resources for many of these dialects, a novel approach to Dialectal Identification (DID) was investigated by leveraging pre-trained acoustic models.  A multi-stage approach was developed to first classify into one of four umbrella Arabic dialects, and then into a more fine-grained regional DID with seventeen dialects.

Erin Moss – Honours Project

University: Associate Professor Beena Ahmed, UNSW

Title: Domain Specific Sentiment Analysis

Erin’s project investigated how first determining the domain context (topic, or subject matter) could be used to improve training of sentiment classification models for Natural Language Processing.  The system developed included a first statistical model to detect the domain, followed by a second stage where this information was used to select a specialised lexicon on which the sentiment analysis classifier was trained.

We’re helping service providers and organisations unlock the full potential of conversations.Learn more about the Dubber AI Centre of Excellence.

Melbourne, Australia: 31 January 2023 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX:DUB), the leading unified call recording and conversational intelligence platform to global telecommunication service and solution providers, today released its 2Q FY23 Appendix 4C and is pleased to provide this Quarterly Activities Report

2Q FY23 Snapshot

• Operating cash receipts for the quarter were $8.3m (up 48% PcP)
• Cash on hand at 31 December 2022 was $56.7m
• First Foundation contract for Dubber Notes secured with North American Microsoft
  Teams Service Provider, Ziro
• Leading UK service provider Gamma contracts initially for the launch of Dubber
  recording and AI services and migration of existing recording users
• Vodafone expands contract with Dubber services launched into UC and mobile
  networks in Europe, initially with Vodafone UK, and Vodafone Germany
• Virgin Media-02 expands existing contract to wider customer base
• US service provider NTS announces the launch of its Dubber service
• Alianza chooses Dubber as the embedded recording and AI service for its UC
  platform serving as a core network for over 200 Service Providers
• JB Hi-Fi Business contracts as the largest distribution partner for Telstra business
  services
• Ernst & Young Melbourne appointed as the Company’s new auditor

At the end of last year Cavell offered key spokespeople from our industry to step up, discuss and debate the Microsoft roadmap at their London event. If one message stood out above the rest, it’s that the Microsoft Teams growth spurt is far from finished. Teams is a somewhat unexpected high achiever across the board, with 53% of organisations globally choosing it over other collaboration tools. In fact, monthly user numbers for Teams are rumoured to hit an impressive 300 million in Q1 23. With a self-proclaimed focus being put into Microsoft’s relationship with Telephony, it’s an exciting time to be in the Service Provider seat and ride the investment that this juggernaut is pumping into the Mobile landscape.

Digging into Microsoft’s Teams platform development, it seems productivity is still king when it comes to measuring ROI. Empowering organisations with the means to collaborate remotely is critical, with ‘in office’ numbers failing to rise after the pandemic shift (the full-time adoption of hybrid working is now commonplace.) With over 450+ new features released in the past year alone, MS Teams is the obvious choice for companies embracing the modern workplace, and the proof is in the numbers. A cool 33% of organisations swapped to MS Teams from another platform in 2022. So, in the words of Microsoft’s Nick Hedderman, Teams is providing over half the planet with its ‘digital fabric.’ The reason for that seems clear, it’s productivity-centric with a strong development roadmap and a reputation built over decades.

We all want to connect and communicate in our own way- we have our best ideas when we feel relaxed. Microsoft have taken this notion and thrown their energy into Teams Mobile, the next step in creating true flexibility on a collaborative platform. Throughout the day, speakers continued to voice the value of telephony investment, with particular emphasis on Operator Connect. For end users looking to grow and scale their offering, Operator Connect provides the simple UX that customers are looking for- a solution that will unify their organisations’ telephony with certainty. As Marc Burkhard of Swisscom rightly put it: ‘we will become mobile first in the future’. With this in mind, the Operator Connect piece is critical for larger organisations to connect and expand their Teams Mobility in 2023 and beyond.

If Microsoft were clear on their telephony investment, the Service Providers drilled home the need to make those services stand out in a crowded arena. According to Andrew Small of BT: ‘it’s about differentiating the entire end-to-end customer experience.’ This is where revenue boosting platforms like Dubber come in. Adding voice AI and business insights to the Teams offering to improve the day-to-day of both user and manager. Throughout the event, it was obvious that the pressure is on to make the most of the financial investment in 5G and mobile. For Service Providers, differentiators like Dubber who are focused on adding retention, strategic partnership and revenue to the Teams mobile offering are a welcome gift.

If you only took away two learnings from the event it should be these: Microsoft are heavily invested in Telephony, with Teams Mobile set to transform the platform. Tools that create differentiation like Dubber are pivotal to helping SPs increase their Teams adoption and stand out in a competitive landscape.  And secondly, Operator Connect is the gateway to scaling your telephony and improving revenue. Overall, the atmosphere in the room was a united one, the general consensus? ‘We’re better together’.

To dive into the detail around these points, you can check out the full webinar on-demand here.

Tom Arbuthnot is co-founder of Empowering.Cloud, a Microsoft Teams Industry Professionals Community., who also offer enablement programs for enterprises and Microsoft partners.

Tom hosted Dubber’s recent webinar about the opportunities to add services and revenue around Microsoft Teams Operator Connect. The panel included Timoor Husain of Microsoft, Mark Bunnell of Nuwave and Adrian di Pietrantonio of Dubber.

This blog summarises some of the key takeaways. To check out the entire webinar please click here.

Microsoft is scaling and simplifying PSTN connectivity for the customer and the service provider

Microsoft Teams Operator Connect has been in the market for over a year, and progress and adoption have been good. There are 43 Operator Connect service providers, and many more are coming. In this model, the operator is directly connected to Microsoft, which makes it very simple for the operator and customer to provision phone numbers.

Microsoft has been bringing telephony to their Unified Communications proposition for over 14 years. Traditionally, this involved customers deploying and managing their own session border controller infrastructure and connecting to the service provider with SIP trunks. This traditional model was quite complex, requiring a lot of infrastructure and professional services.

Operator Connect offers a much simpler model, which goes some way to explaining the quick uptake and adoption by Service. It sits alongside Microsoft’s Calling plans and Direct Routing as one of four options for PSTN connectivity for Teams users.

Teams Phone Mobile is the latest connectivity option to hit the market from Microsoft, running on the back of the operator connect platform. It will offer the new ability to be a single mobile/cell number for your mobile and Teams. One of the benefits is that a single Teams-certified recording platform like Dubber can record and capture both the Teams and the mobile calls.

Combined, these four options give customers the  choice to pick the combination that is right for them and personalise their experience of MS Teams. This level of choice also increases competition in the service provider market.

Customers want to reduce infrastructure and reduce costs

Customers are rapidly moving to Cloud Telephony platforms like Teams Phone. They are moving away from complex on-premises infrastructure, such as local SBCs, in favour of scalable cloud services.

I observed that with the acceleration of Microsoft Teams Phone, customers are often taking the opportunity to reassess their PSTN service provider choice and are looking to optimise spending and ROI on tech investment.

There is an increasing demand for self-service solutions. Mark Bunnell, COO Nuwave, noted 70% of Nuwave’s customers are moving to self-service cloud management.

There is no doubt that while Teams Phone is a rapidly growing market, there is competitive and margin pressure on service providers. Microsoft expects more providers to join Operator Connect in the future. With over 53% of organisations already choosing teams over other communication tools.

There are opportunities to add value and revenue with additional services customers need

While there is pressure on the minutes business, and it is getting somewhat commoditised, some great opportunities exist to differentiate and add value. Microsoft Teams is an ecosystem solution, meaning you need many components from different Microsoft partners to complete the customer solution. These include PSTN connectivity, recording, contact centre, eCDN, reporting and devices.

Service providers are in a great position to build out their offering with telco-related services like recording, business insights, compliance and contact centre. Differentiating services in this way empowers customers to unlock the value ‘in’ the network, improve stickiness and boost revenue.

Timoor Husain, Microsoft, noted the opportunity to offer the even fuller Microsoft 365 stack as an operator as a true managed service.

Mark also pointed out that there is still a lot of complexity in enterprise telephony and that does provide opportunities.

Operator Connect Accelerators like Nuwave can increase speed to  market and allow you to add additional services

Nuwave offers service providers a platform you can integrate to quickly get onto Operator Connect and give your customers a full self-service experience. They are one of Microsoft’s certified Operator Connect Accelerator partners.

Beyond Operator Connect, Nuwave has already integrated with Dubber and can add additional revenue-generating services for your customers, such as Contact Center and Dubber recording. All from a single platform.

If service providers prefer, they can also integrate Dubber directly into their service provider network.

With Dubber, you can offer recording and data insights for traditional PSTN calls and all Teams’ VoIP calls and meetings

Dubbers’ platform is specifically for service providers. Adrian di Pietrantonio noted Dubber works with over 175 providers.

Dubber allows operators to offer cloud-based Teams certified recording for customers for compliance and productivity improvements. Beyond compliance, increasingly required by customers in all markets, customers and providers are leveraging recording data and offering new value-added services. With Dubber, recording can be extended beyond just the PSTN calls into the customers’ Teams’ VoIP calls and meetings, which is essential for complete customer coverage.

To dive into the detail around these points, you can check out the full webinar on-demand

In July of 2022, NUWAVE became Dubber’s first Operator Connect Foundation Partner. This strategic partnership decision was pivotal for both companies as the need to scale Dubber’s technology quickly and globally became a top priority.

With Dubber’s Unified Conversational Recording (UCR) capabilities integrated into iPILOT and available to all NUWAVE customers as an entry-level solution at no cost, NUWAVE deploys the Dubber platform with instantly automatic provisioning.

NUWAVE and its partners can then choose to work with Dubber to introduce customers to richer and more comprehensive conversational recording and AI solutions to address a broad range of business needs by unlocking valuable information and insights from conversations across their voice and video calls.

“Optus is a challenger brand”, says Catherine Yue, Senior Director of Mobile for Optus Enterprise and Business. “We’re not the incumbent and we are in a quite different place in the market. We need to do things differently. For us that means looking for products and services we can use to delight and inspire our customers. Things like Dubber.”

Yue says her team looks for propositions which can improve the customer experience and the employee experience for Optus’ enterprise and SMB customers. “Dubber is very much focused on both, you can see it from a management perspective and an employee perspective. It answers their need to collect better insights and improve what they are doing and that means that in turn it helps them improve their customers’ experience.”

Delighting the customer cuts to the core of Optus’ philosophy. Yue says it’s what sits at the core of mobility and how Optus aims to carve out a greater share of the B2B mobility market. It’s not only enterprise and business customers. She says: “I look at what my colleagues are doing on the consumer and prepaid markets and it’s much the same. When you’re a challenger brand you have to find different focus areas.”

Optus was first introduced to Dubber when the company’s financial services team needed to find tools that could help customers deal with compliance requirements. Dubber ticked that box. Then, Yue says; “Once we double clicked on it and saw what it could do, we realised Dubber was much larger than financial services. We talked to our customers and quickly found there are so many other use cases. It could be in retail, legal, entertainment or in healthcare. We found there is so much that our customers can do with it.”

While Dubber has the ability to drive new revenue streams for a carrier like Optus, Yue says it makes for stickier customers. “Of course we want to increase the revenue from our customer base, but we can only do that if we have a proposition which resonates with customers and adds value. We want to offer them something that’s compelling and relevant.”

It’s still early days for Optus Enterprise and Business and Dubber, yet Yue says her team are already having conversations with customers about empowering their people to elevate their work to another level. It’s no longer just about a mobile device and voice, it’s about what else can be done.

Because Dubber is native on the Optus network, Yue says it makes it simpler for customers. She says: “It’s not like you have to go through an app or anything else, you actually just make a call and it records. There’s no additional action.”

For Yue and Optus, being able to partner with technology providers like Dubber is central. “Our portfolio is stronger because of our partnership. Dubber’s experience globally and the technical resource compliments us as a carrier. The partnership with the sales and marketing teams is also valuable. We can deliver a much stronger proposition because we partner.”

• ZIRO and Dubber sign Foundation Agreement enabling every customer to turn calls into AI driven notes and productivity outcomes for MS Teams
• Launch of Revolutionary out-of-box productivity for MS Teams, with ZIRO embedding Dubber Moments subscription as a standard feature for every user
• ZIRO and Dubber collaborate on growth, upsell to Dubber Notes for MS Teams
• ZIRO launching Dubber Moments and Dubber Notes for MS Teams launching January 2023

Melbourne, Australia, LONDON, DALLAS – 7 December 2022 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB), the leading conversational intelligence and unified recording platform for service providers and their customers globally, announced it has signed a Foundation Partner agreement with ZIRO, based in South Denver, Colorado, servicing customers in Canada and the United States. The partnership agreement encompasses a range of Dubber’s products, as well as newly released Dubber Moments and Dubber Notes for MS Teams. ZIRO will be launching the relationship to their customers in January 2023 with Dubber supporting their growth via the Dubber Foundation program.

ZIRO is focused on delivering increased value to their end users. By embedding Dubber Moments within all MS Teams subscriptions provided by ZIRO, their end users get an out-of-the-box productivity feature, with outstanding user experience, differentiated from other providers and powered by Dubber.

Dubber Moments users have the option to upgrade with a click to the fully featured Dubber Notes for MS Teams subscription, which provides a complete automation of meeting and call note taking including AI features such as auto actions items, sections of conversations, speakers, topics and Dubber Moments. Via a collaborative process between Dubber and ZIRO through various channel marketing activities, users will be shown the benefits of upgrading to Dubber Notes for MS Teams.

Dubber’s Unified Recording and Unified Recording + Insight suite of packages will also be available via ZIRO.

Steven Karachinsky, CEO, ZIRO:

“We’re thrilled to partner with Dubber because they share our passion for innovation and no-hassle values. They take recording to a whole new level by making it accurate, compliant, and actionable. That speaks volumes to us and to our customers, especially those in healthcare and financial institutions. How many times have we sat in meetings and either forgotten to take notes or dreaded making sense of a native app’s transcription? With Dubber, those days are over.

“We look forward to working with Dubber and to continue providing more value to customers by making UC easier than ever.”

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber:

“We’re really pleased to be launching a ‘Notes’ based Foundation program with ZIRO which will enable a fantastic user experience for their customers. ZIRO’s passion for innovation and market leading features for their Unified Communications services fits perfectly with the aspirations of Dubber’s ground-breaking platform. Customers can put away their pen and paper and enjoy AI driven note taking as a source of information and productivity without having to rely on ‘whole of conversation’ transcription.

“We look forward to working with ZIRO to help them capitalize on their differentiated product offering to continually deliver more outcomes for more customers, turning UC into an increasingly valuable tool at the core of everyday life and business workflows.”

Background:

The Dubber Foundation program is a solution and engagement model which sees Dubber being made available for every user opening up capabilities for differentiation at a Service Provider level.

With the Foundation program a Dubber product is embedded as a standard feature into every service to the end customer. The program then sees both Dubber and the Service Provider engage directly with the customer to introduce higher value products which provide benefits to the customer and drive accretive revenues, improved margin, differentiation and retention for the Service Provider.

About ZIRO:

ZIRO is the only solution provider making Unified Communications simple and easy. We help enterprise IT teams select, set up, and manage their phone, contact center, and meeting room tech with a partner they can trust. With over a decade of UC know-how, ZIRO is changing the status quo so companies can solve their biggest IT challenges without the hassle. For more information, visit https://goziro.com.

About Dubber:

Dubber enables Service Providers to unlock the potential of the network – turning every conversation into an exponential source of value for differentiated innovation, retention, and revenue. Listed on the ASX, Dubber is the clear market leader in conversational intelligence and unified recording – embedded at the heart of over 175 service provider networks.

For more information, please visit Dubber on www.dubber.net or contact:

Dubber Global Investors & Media
Terry Alberstein
terry@navigatecommunication.com.au
+61 (0) 458 484 921

Ziro Investors & Media
Achim Klor
aklor@goziro.com
+1 514-379-2128

We are pleased to announce that we have formally partnered with NTSCOM who is launching Dubber solutions through iPILOT across the United States!

NTSCOM is a Microsoft Operator Connect partner with 20+ years of experience in the carrier industry.  Together with NUWAVE’s iPILOT, NTSCOM automates both Direct Routing and Operator Connect capabilities while solving for carrier-hosted SBCs, on-premises SIP trunks, or bring-your-own SBCs, carriers, and operators. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, NTSCOM delivers services across the nation as well as internationally in Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

As an integrated global telecommunications solutions provider, NTSCOM provides a range of communications services for business telecommunication channels. Natively integrated into the iPILOT provisioning -portal, partnering with Dubber enables NTSCOM’s offerings to include seamless automation for unified recording and conversational intelligence, expanding the distribution of industry-leading solutions and enhancing customer experience and business intelligence.

Commenting on the announcement, Aaron Barnes, NTSCOM CEO said: “We are thrilled to partner with Dubber as their solutions are a natural fit into our current offerings and are immediately available from our network. We have already commenced deploying Dubber services into major Enterprise accounts such as TD SYNNEX and Konica Minolta.

While compliance recording and analytics are integral to furthering our customer experience, we’re equally excited about the opportunity to address the need for automated workflows and productivity based on Dubber insights. Adoption of the Dubber platform illustrates NTSCOM’s  commitment to delivering the best-in-industry solutions to enhance our customer experiences.”

As NTSCOM serves customers across government, education, and healthcare sectors, complying with industry regulations and mandates is of the utmost importance. Dubber’s compliant conversational intelligence platform plays a crucial role in ensuring compliance mandates are met for both internal and external duty of care standards. Dubber’s software entitles NTSCOM’s customers to use conversational intelligence to reveal insights that are aligned with industry regulations and guidelines.

This strategic partnership mutually benefits both companies as NTSCOM brings forward solutions to improve customer experience, Dubber is deploying solutions and expanding its reach across the United States.

“Our service, integrated with iPILOT will be seamlessly provisioned with NTSCOM offerings and Microsoft Teams, enabling Dubber to be uniquely delivered as a service so that NTSCOM, its customers and partners can switch on and deliver value immediately.

NTSCOM is an important component of our service provider partnership strategy and we aim to become a key attribute to their success.  By coming together we provide the key value differentiation customers are looking for and service providers require to continue meeting the needs of the quickly evolving data-shaped landscape. Everyone at Dubber and NTSCOM is very excited by this new partnership.” – Michael Abenhaim, Dubber SVP of Americas Sales.