The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a wave of digital development that encompasses our physical surroundings. Where the First Industrial Revolution used steam power to transform manufacturing and travel, the Second used electric power to enable mass-production, and the Third used technology to automate processes, the Fourth uses emerging technology including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and quantum computing.

This series will give a general overview of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with future pieces discussing what this will mean for networks, telecommunications, customer service, and the workforce.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and business

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to generate income and improve quality of life through new products and services that increase efficiency and make our lives easier. It is predicted that logistics and global supply chains will improve, reducing the cost of transportation and communication and the overall cost of trade: resulting in new markets and economic growth.

Market disruption will be driven by agile players who can offer better quality, experience, speed, or price options thanks to improvements in technology. We have already seen how technology is creating new ways to consume goods and services via smartphones. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will affect customer expectations, as well as product and business development.

Artificial intelligence

AI is fast becoming a part of everyday life. Self-driving cars are being developed, while drones and virtual assistants are now commonplace. AI technology is being driven by the availability of vast amounts of data, something that has fuelled the development of our own AI technology. We developed Dubber AI to allow everyone, not just big businesses, to gain insight from their calls, and ultimately make their lives easier. With AI, businesses can identify common problems and resolve complaints to improve customer loyalty, while people in their everyday lives can use call transcripts to remember important details. Other technology companies, such as IBM, are using AI to improve everything from healthcare to Wimbledon.

Telecommunications developments

The telecommunications industry will be at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as a driver of global digital transformation. Investment in technology and interoperability has enabled the flow of data and the creation of new business models across industries. A globally connected network empowers millions of people around the world by giving them access to information and marketplaces.

Data will soon become a commodity such as electricity and telecommunications service providers will need to create an offering that prioritises customer experience in order to succeed. They are uniquely placed to offer a personalised customer experience that extends revenue streams beyond connectivity, through integrated IoT solutions and new communications technologies that leverage developments in augmented and virtual reality. Networks will also evolve from on-premise equipment to an era of software systems.

Competitive advantage will be achieved through the ability to collect data and create new outcomes or experiences for end users. Telecommunications service providers who offer enterprises a variety of data-driven use cases will add value to their offerings and ultimately their customers. 2020 sees 44 zettabytes (44 trillion GB) of annual data flow, 40% of which will be stored or processed in the cloud.

In part two of the Fourth Industrial Revolution series we’ll look at how intuitive networks will create value for customers through flexible services, faster routes to market, and improved user experience.

The new Meeting Recorder tool, exclusively available in the Dubber mobile app, allows users to record meetings from their phone, store them securely in the cloud, and even transcribe them with Zoe voice AI. Record interviews, team meetings, or any conversation you might want to refer to in the future with this essential new tool. Meeting Recorder is as easy as pressing a button: once the meeting is over, it is available to replay just like your calls.

The death of minute-taking

Have you ever been so busy taking notes that you’ve missed what was said next? With Meeting Recorder you can give meeting participants your full attention, knowing you can replay the meeting at any time. With no need to take minutes, meetings can flow uninterrupted. Also, with Zoe, a full transcription of the meeting can be obtained and circulated as a follow-up to the meeting: ensuring nobody misses an important detail.

Transcripts can prompt action points and make collaboration more efficient. Zoe also analyses the sentiment of meeting participants and breaks every recording into sections assigned with a positive, neutral or negative rating. Alerts can be created to notify users of meetings that have been rated as having negative sentiment, and team managers can be alerted to meetings carried out by their direct reports to ensure that they are adhering to policies.

Pinpoint important moments with voice AI

With a full transcription of a meeting available with Zoe voice AI, locating a specific meeting recording is easy with searchable text and keywords. Stay organised by adding tags (such as customer name and attendees) and even attach comments and notes.

Never run out of storage

Unlike other mobile recording apps, Meeting Recorder stores all of your recordings in the cloud, just like your calls: so you’ll never run out of space. This is especially helpful when complying with regulations such as MiFID II, which requires financial interactions to be recorded and stored for up to 7 years. Even if you lose your device you can rest assured that your recordings will be safe in the cloud. Meetings can also be recorded on one device and accessed on another, and recordings can be integrated with existing applications, such as CRM systems, for added productivity, through Dubber’s open API.

It’s all in the palm of your hand

Out of the office and wish you could find your notes from an important phone call or meeting? With the latest version of the Dubber mobile app, you can play back your calls and meetings: anytime, anywhere, from any phone.

Keep all your recordings in the palm of your hand with the Dubber mobile app, available on iOS and Android. Play, share, organise, and analyse your calls with our powerful Zoe voice AI, from anywhere in the world. The app now comes with the new Meeting Recorder tool, which allows users to record meetings and store them securely in the cloud.

The full Dubber experience in an app

Working life doesn’t stop when you leave the office. With the Dubber app, you are no longer tied to your computer. From your phone, you can experience the full suite of Dubber tools wherever you are. View and listen to all of your recorded calls and meetings, just as you would in the web browser version of Dubber.

Our easy search means you can find calls using a range of criteria from date and time to call recipient. Within the playback page you can skip forward to replay an important detail or, if you have Zoe enabled, search the transcription and click on a word to play a conversation from that exact moment.

Tag your recordings from the app to organise them for easy retrieval and management. For a quick highlight of calls that require your action, mark your important calls with our star icon and separate them from the rest of your archive.

Zoe: powerful voice AI in your pocket

The Dubber app enables you to access the power of Zoe voice AI in the palm of your hand: transcribing your calls and meetings, measuring sentiment, and extracting keywords, timestamps and other metadata. Zoe can automate workflows through API integrations with third-party applications such as your CRM. With Zoe Notifications, you can create custom keyword and sentiment alerts to protect your business through proactive customer service.

Meeting Recorder: The death of minute taking?

Meeting Recorder is an exclusive recording tool with voice AI for smart transcription, available as part of the Dubber mobile app. Meeting Recorder securely stores all of your meetings in the cloud so they can be accessed from multiple devices and locations, and you’ll never run out of storage. Hit record during important meetings and talks and let the power of Dubber’s voice AI do the rest.

Meeting Recorder is the only recording app available with Zoe voice AI, eradicating the need for taking minutes with automated voice-to-text transcription. The transcript of the meeting can then be circulated as a follow-up. Zoe also allows you to search for meetings by keywords spoken, as well as within the transcript of a meeting: allowing you to pinpoint the exact part of a meeting you want to review. Sentiment is even analysed: showing an overall rating for the meeting, as well as a detailed breakdown.

Meeting Recorder is an ideal tool for sales and project managers who want to capture their team meetings in order to follow up on action points or as a coaching resource.

Playback is a call capture service for individuals that allows users to save calls that have already taken place. Users have three days after a call to save it for unlimited replay for one year. Features such as tagging and searching calls are available via mobile and web apps.

How does Playback work?

Playback is an innovative call capture service designed specifically for individuals. This unique product allows users to save calls that have already taken place. After each call is received or made, the user has three days to save it for unlimited replay for one year. Playback has all of the features of Dubber: allowing users to tag their saved calls, search and filter their results, and securely share their calls. Playback is available via the Dubber mobile app, which sends push notifications to remind users to save calls. Playback can also be accessed via web and deskphone apps. Users are charged per saved call. Playback works across fixed line and mobile calls, allowing users to access all of their communications.

A unique product for individuals

Playback calls remain private to the user who made or received them, unless they are shared by the user. Playback has one private login and the user has full control over which calls are saved and which aren’t. Whitelist and blacklist functions can even automate the saving or deleting of all captured calls from or to certain numbers.

Playback is the answer to forgetfulness. If you’ve ever put the phone down and immediately forgotten an important detail from the conversation, Playback is for you! Perfect for moments when a pen and paper aren’t handy, Playback can help everyone in their day-to-day lives as well as in the world of work. Playback is great for busy people on the go, people who hate taking notes and meeting minutes and those of us who are just a bit forgetful sometimes.

Just like other Dubber services, Playback can be managed via a mobile app: anytime, anywhere. Playback can also be used alongside voice AI Zoe for added benefits including transcription, keyword search, and sentiment analysis.

Designed for busy workers

Playback is designed for mobile workers who take calls on the go. Many sole traders do not have the luxury of taking calls at their desk and often conduct business while travelling between jobs. Playback gives them peace of mind that all those important details about their next job are safely stored for them to replay at their leisure. Here are some examples:

Sole traders: plumbers

Plumbers spend the majority of their time working remotely, or travelling from one client to another. Any calls they receive about new work are likely to be taken while they are working or driving, neither of which is convenient for noting down details such as the address. With Playback, a plumber is able to take a hands-free call while driving, safe in the knowledge that they can confirm an address later. At a time when they have returned to their desk and can note down important details, they can browse their call history and choose the calls they want to replay in order to confirm the details of the job.

Journalists

Busy journalists spend much of their time calling sources and conducting interviews over the phone. Rather than trying to make notes during a call, where they might get distracted from the conversation, or miss important details, journalists can replay a conversation to write up an interview. In an industry where accuracy is crucial, knowing a phone call can be replayed at any time gives peace of mind to journalists who can be reassured that any quotes can be easily confirmed.

C-level executives

Playback can make the life of everyone who conducts their business while on the go a whole lot easier. C-level executives who jump from one phone call to another, often taken while travelling between meetings, can benefit from the gift of hindsight that Playback brings. The ability to replay calls — anytime, anywhere — can save time writing follow-up emails to confirm details. Important business can be undertaken over the phone, with the knowledge that the voice equivalent of a paper trail is securely stored in the cloud.

We are so pleased to announce that Cox Business has launched on Dubber. Cox Communications is the largest privately held telecommunications company in North America and Dubber’s call recording and voice AI services are now available across the Cox Business network for all UC, SIP Trunking, and VoIP customers.

Dubber and Cox have integrated their platforms to provide an automated sign up service for Cox Business customers that will instantly provision Dubber call recording on the Cox network. The service is available now for Cox Business customers, after a successful beta testing deployment stage.

Steve McGovern, CEO Dubber:

“Cox is regarded as a leading provider of business communications globally, and is one of the most trusted brands in the telecommunications industry. The Cox integration into dubberconnect.com, with Call Recording, Playback and Contact Centre services, in addition to the Zoe AI suite, provides a seamless experience for customers and a world class service offering which we believe will have widespread applicability across the Cox Business network. We are particularly pleased with the very strong uptake of our premium Call Recording plans, “Contact Centre Agent” and “Plus.”

When you think about call recording, you’re probably thinking of server rooms full of equipment, call centers, RVAs announcing that this call may be monitored for training and coaching purposes…but all that is changing. Call recording no longer requires huge CapEx investment, nor the floor space to house servers. It can enable a business to do far more than just listen to a few random calls a month to rate a consultant’s performance.

Call recording with artificial intelligence opens up a world of new possibilities like reducing churn and increasing net promoter score. If you’re a marketing manager or customer experience manager, this blog is for you!

If churn or retention is part of your targets, you probably think you have enough data on your customers and know exactly why they’re leaving. You probably have access to some reports that tell you why a customer is calling, based on their IVR selection, right? But what about all the other information transacted when a customer is talking to one of your call center agents?

Chances are, unless a customer escalates an issue, or you listen to a few calls a month, you have no idea what happens on a call. Dubber’s Zoe can change all that.

Imagine receiving a report that gives you customer sentiment on every call that takes place. Or being able to identify phrases or keywords spoken during a call that may highlight customer pain points you had no idea existed. Zoe can do this and so much more!

Campaign Reporting

As a marketer, either you or one of your team will be likely be providing regular campaign reporting. And if this is the case, you’re probably relying on the call center to have accurately recorded how the customer heard about you, or if they are calling in relation to a particular campaign. Zoe’s advanced search functionality means you can pull every call where a campaign name or offer was discussed. No more wondering if your response rate is correct, you’ll know exactly how successful your campaign was without worrying if the call centre entered the right campaign details into your CRM or not.

End the guessing game

How many times have you had to estimate the impact of a price rise? With Zoe, you’ll know exactly how many people called and if they churned or changed product, so next time round it won’t be such a guessing game. Simply enter the date range and key words such as ‘price’ and search for negative sentiment to find every call. From here you can either listen to each call or review the transcript and sentiment.

Get the edge on your competitors

Understanding sentiment can give you the edge on the competition. Let’s say a customer has had a negative experience with a call center agent, we’ve all heard these one hundred times over at a BBQ. Chances are, no one knows this call took place aside from the agent and the 10 people the disgruntled customer told. Zoe can alert relevant persons in your organization to the call, allowing them to contact the customer and potentially turn a negative experience into a good one: stopping that customer from churning or leaving a negative review and telling anyone who’ll listen how bad their experience was.

Have you ever put the phone down and forgotten what the last point was? What was the last item you are meant to pick up on the way home? When is that report due? Playback by Dubber is the answer.

These days, many of us are working on the go. If you’re driving or running from one place to the next, grabbing a pen and paper isn’t really an option, so you’re left with having to call the person back, or try and remember the details of the call.

Have the conversation over and over – in a good way!

Playback allows you to save your calls, with the option to keep the call for up to 3 days after it took place. Once you’ve chosen to keep the call, you can listen to it as many times as you like via the Dubber app on your phone. Once you’ve decided to keep the call, a secure audio file is generated, which only you can access.

Claim it as your own

Playback is available to service providers to white label as their own for their customers. The Dubber App can also be customized with your own branding.

Connect via Dubber Connect

If you’re with Cox Business or AT&T, ask your account admin to enable Playback for you and start Playing-back straight away. Your boss and spouse will think your memory has improved immeasurably!

Playback is great for busy people on the go, people who hate taking notes and meeting minutes and those of us who are just a bit forgetful sometimes.

Contact us for more information on Playback today!

Contact centres would be nothing without their agents. As the first point of contact for customers, contact centre agents are the face, or voice, of the company. Organisations with contact centres need to ensure they nurture their agents and provide them with the tools they need to give the best customer care.

With contact centres such an important part of a business, it is important that organisations do what they can to improve employee morale. They must also make sure agents are not held back by technological limitations. When developing our call recording services we had contact centres in mind. We made sure that our Always On call recording and Zoe voice AI could help solve some common issues.

Improve the performance of contact centre agents with morale-boosting AI

In a contact centre, workers cannot just pick up their tasks when they return to work after an absence. Customers will continue to contact the organisation no matter how understaffed the contact centre may be, and it’s up to the remaining agents to manage the workload. At peak hours, this can be stressful for agents who are forced to handle more calls than usual.

When building our call recording solution, we wanted to find ways for organisations to learn more about their customer interactions and the way their business works. We know that an agent’s morale can decrease when understaffing creates a bigger workload for them. This is why we wanted to create technology that can help organisations to reward contact centre agents who outperform at their job. The sentiment analysis of Zoe, our voice AI service, uses speech characteristics to identify the mood of a caller throughout a conversation. Zoe then assigns the call with a positive or negative score. Agents who consistently achieve positive scores can be rewarded for their hard work, and feel like their success can finally be measured and recognised.

Increase the efficiency of your contact centre agents with automated workflows

Contact centre agents often have to use a variety of different software during their working day. This may include CRM databases and workforce management tools. With these different applications, agents may have to familiarise themselves with numerous different interfaces; jumping from one window to another to perform different tasks.

At Dubber, we didn’t want to add yet another interface to deal with. That’s why we made sure that, via our open API, an organisation can integrate our service with other applications. Our API allows developers to integrate Dubber’s functionality into existing systems. This allows the call data and recordings we collect to be used in other applications. It also allows other applications to use our technology, such as our AI or search functionality, to automate processes. For example, a manager could receive a Slack notification after a certain word is spoken during a call.

With the contact centre representing an organisation at key moments on a customer’s journey — enquiring, placing orders, making complaints — it is important to look after your contact centre agents and get the most out of your data. Contact a member of the Dubber team to see how you can provide the best solution for your contact centre.

Technology has the power to make a small business big. Unfortunately, 30% of small business owners find it hard to adapt to new technology, according to a survey undertaken by AT&T.

Common obstacles for small business

Early adoption of technology can be make or break for a small business, but they need help and support in order to take steps towards digital transformation. Many small business owners feel that they are not in a financial position to adopt new technology. With the introduction of SaaS products, smaller businesses now have access to advanced technology for an affordable monthly subscription.

Of course, money is not the only resource that is scarce within the world of small business. Time is another valuable asset that companies of this size are often lacking. New technology must save time for an organisation and not require lengthy installation processes that disrupt current workflow.

Call recording and voice AI as a service

Dubber have democratised call recording and voice AI. We have made this technology available to businesses who previously were discouraged from adopting such services, due to the prohibitive cost of legacy solutions. We’ve also transformed the onboarding process: cutting the time and costs required to deploy our cloud call recording. We even created Dubber Connect to make provisioning customers even easier and reduce the disruption that can be caused by implementing new solutions.

With our limitless storage, there are no hidden costs. Customers can choose the storage plan most suited to their needs. If it turns out they want to increase their minutes allowance or storage length they can change to a different subscription at any time. This flexibility gives small businesses the reassurance that they aren’t committed to a solution that may in the future become too expensive.

Showing the value in voice to small business

Small businesses need to be shown that call recording is no longer solely for compliance. It’s not just for huge enterprises with vast contact centres. SMBs can benefit from capturing their communications too. To illustrate the ways in which businesses of all sizes can benefit from call recording, use cases are a great way to convince customers. Taking the time to enlighten your user base can result in an expanded market and increased revenue.

Digital transformation is something that many organisations are undertaking. With many aspects of business moving to the cloud, small companies shouldn’t be left behind.

We’ve updated our API to make it super easy to access and manage team information. With the updates, service providers and their customers no longer have to log in to the Dubber portal to create and manage teams and their members. Using the API, service providers will be able to administer customer accounts straight from their own portal, as well as enabling customers to manage their own accounts through third-party applications, including their CRM.

Each account will automatically get a team named ‘All’, which cannot be deleted. New teams and their members can be easily managed through the API and Dub points can also now be created and deleted via the API to add and remove call recording implementation easily.

With multiple interfaces a part of modern working, this API update means one fewer application open on your desktop. Account admins can manage their teams from an existing application that they are familiar with, allowing colleagues to share their calls more easily.

The techie bit

We have updated our developer page to include the updates to our API. This page includes samples of how to access the Dubber API can be accessed. All these samples provide the URL for the Sandbox environment, allowing for safe and easy testing of any new developments.

Scroll down our developer page to find the new teams updates

For example, to create a new team member in an existing team, the API request would be:curl -i -k -H "Authorization: Bearer " \


-X POST "https://api.dubber.net/sandbox/v1/accounts//teams//members" \


-H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "user": "johntravolta-dubber-net", "listener": true}'

This would receive the following response:HTTP/1.1 201 CREATED


{


"id": 1234,


"user": "johntravolta-dubber-net",


"date_created": "Wed, 09 Oct 2013 22:39:19 +0000",


"date_updated": "Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:48:40 +0000",


"listener": true


}

At Dubber, we have built our products and services in the cloud: benefitting from the unlimited scalability and storage that this provides. We have chosen Amazon Web Services to enable us to provide high levels of security, reliability, and service. Our infographic shows how a move to the cloud can bring numerous advantages.

The world is changing. The way we communicate has been transformed and the world of work is adapting to new technology. We wanted to learn more about how people’s working lives have changed, and their frustrations with technology that hasn’t quite caught up, so we launched a targeted research campaign to learn more.

Our research surveyed over 2000 service sector employees to better understand the ways in which the world of work is changing and how communications service providers could provide products and tools that could help them reclaim their time.

An increasingly mobile workforce

Workers are no longer tied to their desks and jobs are becoming much less office-based. Our survey found that a third of the workers spend more than four hours away from their desk during their working day. With 18% away for eight hours or more, a significant number of service sector workers are completely mobile.

We wanted to find out just how productive employees are during this time away from their desk. Do they find they are catching up on missed work when they are back at the office? Are they continuing their jobs on the move? And, more importantly, do they have the tools they need to do their work effectively?

Cohesive communications

Dubber are always looking for ways to help people to manage their communications and make the most of every phone call. We were interested to find that over a quarter of all workers we surveyed make more than five business calls a week while mobile, and a tenth do the majority of their business calls on the move. With all these conversations taking place away from a desk, a keyboard, and a trusty notepad, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that takes place during a conversation.

James Slaney, Dubber co-founder, has commented on the research; noting that, “The ability to work anywhere is obviously advantageous and a necessary component of modern work life, but it remains challenging when information is poorly recorded and crucial details missed when workers have phone conversations. Phone calls are often reserved for the important stuff; for the decision that needs to be made, for the question that we want answering urgently. We pick up the phone when we just need to get things done.

When phone calls can be recorded and the information gathered on them digested in the same way we process emails, we will see a resurgence in the number of calls made in the workplace. Once only provided as an always-on service deployed for regulatory compliance or contact centres, now businesses can choose from a range of call recording options and capture their calls at the touch of a button.

Advances in cloud computing and digital transformation mean that phone calls will better retain their value to businesses and advances in speech intelligence technology will allow businesses to unlock their priceless data. For the multi-tasking, mobile working Brit, the ability to make better use of the information gathered through phone calls gives peace of mind so that miscommunication and misunderstandings will be a thing of the past.”

How service providers can help workers

Providing call recording and speech intelligence as a service allows service providers to supply their customers with solutions capable of meeting the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce, at a cost that is affordable to businesses of all sizes. Dubber’s monthly subscription model allows smaller organisations to access the benefits of call recording and pass these efficiencies on to each of their employees.