We now live in a time where most of us have heard of smart speakers and quite a few of us have one (or two or more). According to our friends at Gartner, Ovum, and Voicebot.ai who specialize in smart speaker research, the world has adopted these tiny devices into their homes at an incredible rate. Living rooms and kitchens are the most popular locations to place them, and Amazon has over 70% of the market. Looking at recent reports, 1 in 5 U.S. adults have a smart speaker, for a total of over 48M in the U.S. alone.

Surviving in a forever evolving digital revolution can be challenging in any industry, from healthcare to banking, retail to insurance, e-commerce to even telecommunications, and the message is clear – if you’re not transforming, innovating, optimizing, and evolving then you’re dissolving.

There is currently a lot of momentum behind IoT (Internet of Things) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things).  We’ve looked at the consumer IoT situation in a previous installment of this blog series, now let’s have a peak at the non-consumer side of the fence – the IIoT acronym adopted by the industry.

I am regularly asked questions from customers wanting to WebRTC-enable their existing or new deployments. If this applies to you, then why not make life easy for yourself and take a good look at the Dialogic PowerVille Load Balancer (LB)?  Whether you are looking to complement your existing solutions with WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) technology or deploy an exciting new service in your network, the PowerVille LB should be a key enabling technology in your solution.

Access to the internet has never been easier. Your phone has wifi data while at home and wireless data while on the go. Your favorite café and store offer wifi to guests. Your work files can be accessed remotely from across the world. While we can access whatever we want from wherever we want, there needs to be restrictions set in place to regulate who and what is being accessed. Controls, whether it be parental, employer, or business, are becoming increasingly important.

I was driving to work this week and encountered a fair bit of traffic one morning.  I would imagine many of us do to one extent or another.  I often deal with some that seems to always occur in certain parts of my commute, though on this day the traffic was unbearable.

The challenge from our communication service provider customers is very clear – we need new applications and services to protect and grow ARPU.  We need differentiated new offerings that go beyond connectivity and security of our networks.  We need to launch new solutions much faster than before.  We need to compete on more than just price.  And my favorite ask – we need access to the latest digital technologies, so that our solutions include an exceptional user experience.

Quickly realizing video and WebRTC are becoming “must have” features for applications in IoT, security, customer support, and social applications - Dialogic teamed up with Telestax to launch a free Cloud communications and WebRTC workshop series. The workshop was designed to give developers and non-developers hands on experience with building feature rich real-time communication applications. We traveled the world delivering these workshops to hundreds of individuals, building in hours what in the past took weeks even months. There was only one issue..... You needed to be physically at the workshop in order to participate. Until now!

In my August 15^th blog, I introduced a whitepaper we have about IoT and Real-Time Communications.  I’ve gotten a few comments about that blog and whitepaper along the lines of “I hadn’t really thought of that” to “it’s inevitable.” The reason Dialogic wanted this whitepaper and is making it available are for those very reasons – to get people to think about what might be possible.  Our industry knows real-time communications very well and there is opportunity for us to grow there.

As I have written about many times before, contact centers have always been at the forefront of technological innovation.  That is because they are driven to both reduce costs while increasing customer service. That is why IVRs, speech recognition, remote agents, and VoIP, to name a few, have become entrenched in the contact center.