Video is one of the all-time “killer apps” – allowing users to use their acute sense of vision to see hidden emotion on people’s faces, detect danger, and provide comfort when needed.   Video is quickly becoming the norm for the millennial generation, a feature in many of the social and communications applications.

As part of our investigation of IoT and video, the question of wireless network readiness comes to mind.   Will today and tomorrow’s network be ready to forecast BILLIONS of connected devices?  We take a closer look.

Like many others, I’ve been watching the adoption of video as it goes from a novel curiosity to a mainstream means of communications.  As humans, we are naturally drawn to images, especially moving images.  As a techie, I’m also drawn to automation systems and the Internet of Things.  What happens when you bring IoT and video together?

One of the challenges with any customer care is integrating the mobile application experience with a live agent interaction.   Today’s dis-integrated environment has consumers using their mobile applications to initiate transactions, but if a live agent gets involved, things get messy.   In most cases, that live agent experience requires repeating a host of identity verification questions, often stumping the consumer and causing confusion and frustration.

Real-time video is finding its way into a wide range of applications and industries, including IoT, financial services, education, public safety, and social media.  Video doorbells, home security, virtual insurance adjusters, and video identity verification are becoming mainstream applications that improve security and reduce operational expenses.  Behind these applications is WebRTC technology - providing a standardized method of integrating voice and video into web browsing and client applications. However, despite the hard work put into WebRTC, the effort to integrate WebRTC multi-party video interactions into an application can be daunting.  Many of the applications noted above require centralized recording, multi-party conferencing, mobile-friendly transcoding and other features outside the scope of simple peer-to-peer calling.

This is the third in a multi-part blog series, explaining some of the many features and functions found in the newly released PowerMedia XMS 3.3 software.

If there is any question to the value of recording video, take note of any one of the viral videos of airline customer service “interactions” posted on YouTube.

The emergence of inexpensive storage completely changed customer service interaction and identity verification. Voice-only contact centers almost universally record all customer interactions – thus the pre-call warning that “this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.”  You should expect the same will be true with video customer care interactions.  Recording helps resolve potential conflicts of “he said – she said” disputes with financial transactions.  Contact centers, banking, legal, and other industries require by policy or regulation that all customer interactions are archived, requiring the capability to record video interactions.

However, recording video is significantly more resource intensive than a voice-only recorder. 

This is the second of a multi-part blog series, explaining some of the many features and functions found in the newly released PowerMedia XMS 3.3 software.

Outbound calling applications – reverse 911, contact center call-backs, medication reminder notifications, and conferencing applications all depend on detecting whether an outbound call was completed, and then, whether it was answered by a person or a machine.   Correctly detecting the success (or failure) of an outbound call allows an application to decide whether to retry the call, leave a voice message or connect the call to an agent.  Dialogic has been a leader in developing reliable Call Progress Analysis (CPA) algorithms since the early board-level DSP products, carrying this expertise to XMS. 

This is the first of a multi-part blog series, explaining some of the many features and functions found in the newly released PowerMedia XMS 3.3 software.

Based on a quick survey of our developer community, a major area of new application development is Multi-party video applications – bringing one-way or two-way video to contact center, education, transportation, and security applications.

If you’ve ever had the chance to present to a large group, you know how difficult it is to engage your audience and keep their attention.   Even the best presenter has significant competition from the ever-present mobile device in the hands of the audience. Here’s how the problem can be solved with WebRTC and Communications APIs.

If I had a time machine, I’d take you on a trip back in time to VoiceCon 2010.  It’s not that long ago, just 7 years. You’d recognize much of the event that we now call Enterprise Connect – the same Gaylord Palms with Eric Krapf and his team.  But you’d notice some very different participants in 2010. Back then, Avaya, Cisco, NEC, and Siemens dominated the show floor and the keynote stage. This year Amazon, Google, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Twilio stole the spotlight, leaving only Cisco as an incumbent. What’s happening and why?