UCaaS / General / Blog Post

How AI is Changing the Face of Unified Communications

By Frontier Business Published Aug 13, 2019
artificial intelligence
At first glance, it might look like Unified Communications and artificial intelligence don’t have much in common. When you hear the phrase “artificial intelligence,” self-driving cars or chess-playing computers might spring to mind—not video conferencing or instant messaging. However, AI has significant potential in the UC world to change both the employee and customer experience. By harnessing AI, Unified Communications can help users work smarter, not harder. 

APPLICATIONS FOR UC + AI
Because UC encompasses so many different methods of communication and collaboration, there are seemingly limitless opportunities to innovate with AI. In the coming years, you can expect AI to make UC more intuitive and user-friendly by employing machines to interpret data and analyze information faster than ever. Here are a few ways you might see AI changing and improving UC in the near future.  

Smarter bots: Bots are getting smarter and more capable of successfully supplementing human communications. Employing bots within a UC solution makes dispersing information more efficient than ever. For example, using automated bots on your internal messaging and collaboration platform can allow you to monitor conversations and deliver supporting information right when it’s needed. 

Smoother calls and meetings: In the not-too-distant future, AI could improve phone meetings with features like facial recognition and intelligent speaker tracking, so you always know who’s who and who’s speaking. AI features also have the potential to generate meeting minutes or proactively deliver useful related content to meeting attendees. 

Personalized customer relationships: Remember that UC doesn’t just refer to an enterprise’s internal communications, but also integrates marketing systems and customer communications. AI has the potential to improve customer service through social listening, personalized web visits, chatbots, and Natural Language Generation and Understanding.  AI can also help you welcome returning visitors to your site, suggest relevant add-on purchases and pre-populate forms with customer information. 

Advanced speech-to-text: Speech transcription powered by machine learning has improved leaps and bounds over the past couple of years, adding advanced functionalities like context-specific formatting and accurate recognition of proper nouns. When integrated with UC, speech-to-text tools can help dictate emails or convert voicemail messages into a readable text format. 

SUPPORTING UC + AI
Powering AI-enhanced UC requires a strong cloud-based foundation that’s robust and flexible enough to support advanced collaboration. While still on the way to full AI functionality, Unified Communications by Frontier (UCaaS) is the strong foundation that can help your business prepare for tomorrow’s technologies. 


[1] ComputerWeekly.com and TechTarget, “ Rise of the machines: How AI is changing unified communications”
[2] New Era Technology, “Enterprise AI Bringing Changes to Unified Communications”
[3] Telecom Reseller, “AI + UCaaS + CCaaS: The Future is Now”
[4] iSymplify, “7 Key Trends for UCaaS in 2019”