Blog Post

We’re thrilled to announce that Dubber Moments has been honoured as the Platinum Winner in the Best AI Innovation in Telco category at Future Digital Awards for Telco Innovation 2024.  The awards mark our second major industry win since the release of Dubber Moments in June 2023. This accolade follows closely after our “Best AI Product in Telecom” award at the esteemed CogX Festival. We’re delighted to see the industry acknowledging the transformative power of Conversation Intelligence and the vital role of voice data in the future of telecom.

The Future Digital Awards, presented by Juniper Research, a leading analyst house specialising in fintech, telecommunications, and IoT, represents the best in technology innovation. Winning the Best AI Innovation in Telco category against a host of innovative competitors is a fantastic milestone for us. This award signifies the industry’s recognition of our commitment to pioneering AI solutions for providers and reshaping the future of telecom with Conversation Intelligence.

Cutting Edge AI for Providers & Users

Dubber Moments revolutionises the offerings of providers, enabling them to supply immediate, out-of-the-box AI insights for customers. Its sophisticated AI and natural language processing capabilities allow for an in-depth analysis of conversations, identifying key moments based on context, not transcripts. From detecting actions and complaints to uncovering various conversational nuances, Dubber Moments offers actionable intelligence from each conversation. This is pivotal for service providers and businesses looking to gain insights from their conversations without extensive in-house AI resources.

Dubber Moments is a revolutionary opportunity for providers to deliver AI functionality to organisations of any size, or embedded in their own network to enhance the communications experience for any user on their network. 

“Dubber Moments enables simple understanding of areas which fundamentally affect a business such as voice of the customer, employee safety and wellbeing, and sales performance” said James Slaney, COO of Dubber.

“We are continuously expanding the capabilities of Dubber Moments, releasing new Moments like ‘Abuse’ to recognise harassment and enhance staff wellbeing and ‘Sales Close’, which allows sales leaders to proactively analyse and provide meaningful feedback to ensure their teams’ optimal performance.”

“We’re so proud of the immediate impact that Dubber Moments has for customers of all sizes and are pleased to receive this recognition at the Future Digital Awards. It is a testament to our team’s vision for transforming communications across Service Provider networks into valuable, insightful data. This award not only highlights our innovation but also signals the significant impact our technology is poised to have across the communications sector.”

A Bright Future 

Securing the top spot at the Future Digital Awards is not just an occasion for celebration at Dubber; it’s a powerful validation of the continuous hard work and innovation demonstrated by our team. These awards are more than just accolades, they are a testament to our commitment to leading innovation in the telecom industry through AI.

To see an example of Dubber Moments in action, click here to learn more about how Devonport and Dubber used AI-powered Moments to change the way their call centre interacted with residents and provided valuable insights for the Council to make data-based decisions.

Dubber, the global leader in network based conversation intelligence and capture, has launched ‘Moments’, a revolutionary AI product designed to redefine what individuals and organisations expect from their communications and bring a new level of engagement between Dubbers 170+ global service provider Partners and their customers.

Changing Communications Forever

Since its founding in 2011, Dubber has consistently been at the forefront of pioneering solutions for Communication Service Providers and their customers. Today, it supports over 170 service providers and thousands of businesses across the globe by capturing and analysing conversations at volume across an entire network. The Dubber vision has been to move beyond traditional transcription alone towards addressing all modern business needs with the development of actionable, meaningful insights that can truly inform business strategies directly from the Service Provider network.

In response to these evolving demands, Dubber has released their out of the box solution family called ‘Moments’. This growing suite of features, powered by advanced AI and conversation intelligence, goes beyond the words and identifies the context within the voice conversation.

A single identified ‘Moment’ provides immediate benefit within a conversation, but when correlated across an entire organisation it creates amazing ‘Insights’. Employing data visualisation, Insights provides an intuitive snapshot of communication patterns and trends, transforming complex data into understandable intelligence for individuals and all sizes of business.

Future product roadmap releases will include a range of new ‘Moments’ that will help organisations to improve customer experience, enhance the performance of individuals, teams and improve employee engagement.

Decoding the Conversation

Following research into business-critical conversations, led by Dr. Iain McCowan, head of Dubbers AI Labs, the initial rollout will begin with the ‘Complaints Moment’, which pinpoints customer complaints and related topics within conversations. This ‘Moment’, part of the customer experience family of ‘Moments’, enables all organisations to promptly gain insights into customer grievances and handle them effectively.

Following this, ‘Actions Moment’ will be launched as a network feature, enhancing Dubber’s technology by detecting commitments made during conversations and converting them into tasks or reminders which has the ability to revolutionise the relationship with service providers and their customers.

The Revolution of Communications

With Communication Service Providers globally facing the challenges of commoditisation and ongoing cost pressures, it’s smart to consider new ways to leverage their networks, build new revenues and delight customers at the same time. Dubber enables service providers to consistently deliver innovation and value to their customers, helping them to understand and action intelligence based on outcomes produced through Dubber ‘Moments’ directly from their networks.

Steve McGovern, CEO of Dubber, stated, “We have been promoting a view for many years that AI will be a part of every telephony service and have built the Dubber platform to enable that eventuality. Dubber is designed specifically for Service Provider delivery as opposed to direct end user integration since we believe that the network is the source of any communication and the SP’s have the ability to provision, bill and support at scale.

To us, it just makes sense.

With the launch of ‘Moments’ we’re taking a significant step towards fulfilling that philosophy and fundamentally transforming communications. Despite the evolving ways in which we communicate, the core nature of conversations remains unchanged. There are always key moments within a conversation that yield new intelligence, inspire action, or deepen understanding. ‘Moments’ captures these pivotal points from any conversation on the network and transforms them into insights, delivering tangible business value and empowering service providers to redefine their offerings directly from their networks.”

Stuart Pritchard, Vice President, Optus Enterprise, speaking at the launch of ‘Moments’ said, “AI is becoming broadly part of our lives and customers are expecting to seek benefits from it. When AI can be used to directly solve business challenges, effectively out of the box, it simplifies the customer’s decision making and assists our sales teams. Currently, Dubber is assisting Optus in a special campaign that promotes the Dubber AI functionality around automatically detecting complaints for organisations and summarisation of calls for each user.”

McGovern added, “At Dubber, AI isn’t just a buzzword – it’s the key to unlocking the value of conversations happening across service provider networks. In effect, we are bringing the network to life enabling the content and packaging it into valuable outcomes which can be accessed via Dubber’s applications, via direct network based notifications or via API.

With the unprecedented volume of data available to train our Dubber AI engine, we’re turning every conversation into a chance to extract valuable moments that can enhance customer understanding, elevate employee experience, and identify product improvement opportunities.”

Find out more about ‘Moments’ here.

About Dubber:

Dubber, the global leader in conversational intelligence, offers cutting-edge solutions designed for CSPs to get the most out of their data. Listed on the ASX, the company’s innovative cloud platform connects to over 170+ service providers, capturing crucial information from voice, video, chat, and SMS data, also known as “moments.” By harnessing advanced capture and AI technologies, Dubber transforms these moments into valuable business insights, enabling CSPs to differentiate, innovate, and monetise their networks.

For more information, contact:

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

Dubber Americas and EMEA Media
Jake Galland – Account Manager, TFD, jake@wearetfd.com

Together, Dubber & NTSCOM are helping Microsoft Teams users meet compliance requirements, elevate customer experience, automate workflows, and increase productivity across a wide array of business verticals. Customers have immediate and seamless access to Dubber’s compliant and secure conversation capture and insights solution through NTSCOM via iPILOT.

Businesses in regulated industries can now create a compliant, easily accessible recording of every conversation in one place – critical for meeting regulatory compliance mandates. With the recent trend towards hybrid and remote working, the explosion in the usage of communications platforms like Microsoft Teams has never been more important.

However, there is an opportunity for businesses to do more with their conversation data beyond compliance. Dubber and NTSCOM are enabling businesses to improve business outcomes.

Here are a few sector-specific examples:

Healthcare

The healthcare landscape is constantly changing, so Dubber and NTSCOM have partnered to deliver  flexible solutions for customers in this sector. Organizations can now keep up pace with changing compliance requirements, but also use information-rich conversation data to improve the quality of healthcare provided and staff productivity.

In October of 2022, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) strategic vision of expanding access to affordable health care and improving health equity was advanced when, under the Affordable Healthcare Act, new compliance and recording rules went into play. During the enrollment period, Medicare & Medicaid Services will require all supplemental insurance sellers to record and retain all marketing and sales conversations for 10 years. See CMS Recording Mandate.

The use of telemedicine has increased significantly over the past few years as well, and voice intelligence plays an increasingly essential role in accelerating better-automated customer experience with telemedicine – both for providers and patients.  With Dubber, customers can:

• Improve patient outcomes and resolve disputes through the elimination of manual note-taking with automated transcriptions
• Meet regulatory and legal requirements (CMS Mandate)
• Seamlessly monitor and supervise to maintain conduct standards, safeguard electronically protected health information, and avoid any data breaches (ePHI)

Education

While local, state, and Federal education policies may differ, the need for unified call recording has never been so crucial in education.  The pandemic provided the opportunity for a surge in online instruction: whether asynchronous, synchronous, or hybrid, many institutions are continuing to offer multiple ways to complete coursework. There is now an increased need for accessibility, accountability, and capturing lectures, group work, and other in-class activities. All this is essential to improve online learning standards for stakeholders at all levels: teachers, students, parents, administration and government agencies.

Institutions at all levels heavily use video conferencing and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams to engage students and improve performance.  Integrating Dubber’s suite of voice recording tools allows customers to:

• Uncover student insights and provide a record of student contacts and conversations
• Capture learning on every platform without the cost and limits of application-specific and legacy platforms
• Meet compliance mandates for education at all levels

Government

Governments, too, are increasing their use of innovative technology.  This provides huge benefits to oversight, employees, and the public.

Technology with value-added services such as Dubber increases organizational efficiencies, minimizes spending across all departments and simplifies the processes that inherently bog down public service. Dubber allows federal, state, and local governments to:

• Quickly, accurately and easily fulfill compliance and public information requests.
• Obtain high-quality training and recording insights that can be used to improve coaching, as well as employee onboarding and upskilling
• Improve data collection for feedback to other governmental agencies or departments
• Enhance public safety with the capture and storage of critical communications

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.

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

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.

May of 2022, Medicare & Medicaid Services mandated specific compliance and recording changes that go into effect on October 1st 2022. During the enrollment period, Medicare & Medicaid Services will require all supplemental insurance sellers to record and retain all marketing and sales conversations for 10 years.

Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ruling progresses its strategic vision of expanding access to affordable health care and improving health equity. The ruling will affect and support the 53 million Americans enrolled in Medicare health or drug plans and their healthcare providers.

“This spring, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Final Rule CMS-4192-F. Part of this ruling requires Third Party Marketing Organizations (TPMO) (TPMO definition includes organizations and individuals, including, independent agents and brokers) to record all sales and marketing interactions in their entirety, including plan enrollment, with beneficiaries that take place over the phone. This applies to all current and new Medicare Advantage and Medicaid beneficiaries. Agents are also required to maintain these recordings for 10 years. Please note that we’ll be requesting the required call recordings when we perform our sales audits.” – Premera Blue Cross

Among these changes, the ruling notes:

CMS is finalizing changes to marketing and communications requirements that will protect Medicare beneficiaries by ensuring they receive accurate and accessible information about Medicare coverage.

As healthcare agents and insurance brokers are third-party marketing organizations, to retain an accurate record of contact, they are mandated to record all calls with both clients and prospects where Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D plans are discussed.

With Dubber’s conversational call recording and intelligence platform, healthcare professionals and the healthcare industry are able to meet these new requirements:

• Compliance and regulatory management
  Compliantly record, securely store and encrypt all conversational data required by HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, KYC, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, and more in the Dubber Conversation Intelligence Cloud.
• Critical data archiving and record management
  Capture, preserve, recover and archive valuable conversational data. Empower comprehensive and continuous compliance control. Enact legal hold.
• Rapid investigations and discoverability
  Real-time search and reporting. Surface crucial conversations to support rapid investigation and effectively respond to audit requests quickly and accurately.
• Integrate
  Easily integrate metadata and insights using the Dubber API with compliance management platforms, CRM and big data sets.

With a compliant, cost-effective and secure conversation capture solution, available via a SaaS model, healthcare providers and agents can not only meet the new legal mandate, but they can reduce their risk, monitor processes and patient service, all while eliminating errors in communication. Dubber is deployed immediately to satisfy the voice-based record-keeping needs of operations and patients to meet both the external and internal duty of care standards.

As healthcare agents and insurance brokers are third-party marketing organizations, to retain an accurate record of contact, they are mandated to record all calls with both clients and prospects where Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D plans are discussed.

With Dubber’s conversational call recording and intelligence platform, healthcare professionals and the healthcare industry are able to meet these new requirements:

• Compliance and regulatory management
  Compliantly record, securely store and encrypt all conversational data required by HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, KYC, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, and more in the Dubber Conversation Intelligence Cloud.
• Critical data archiving and record management
  Capture, preserve, recover and archive valuable conversational data. Empower comprehensive and continuous compliance control. Enact legal hold.
• Rapid investigations and discoverability
  Real-time search and reporting. Surface crucial conversations to support rapid investigation and effectively respond to audit requests quickly and accurately.
• Integrate
  Easily integrate metadata and insights using the Dubber API with compliance management platforms, CRM and big data sets.

With a compliant, cost-effective and secure conversation capture solution, available via a SaaS model, healthcare providers and agents can not only meet the new legal mandate, but they can reduce their risk, monitor processes and patient service, all while eliminating errors in communication. Dubber is deployed immediately to satisfy the voice-based record-keeping needs of operations and patients to meet both the external and internal duty of care standards.