Unified Communications Featured Article

ITEXPO Exhibitor Speech Mobility Tells Its Story

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Speech Mobility (News - Alert) built its Evatel integrated communications platform to provide smart telephony and safe mobility for business people on the fast track. The company will be at ITEXPO next week talking about that solution. We recently checked in with Bachir Halimi (News - Alert), president and CEO of Speech Mobility, to learn more.

To what extent are you leveraging APIs to enhance business opportunities?
APIs are the connectors that enable collaboration between different user communications tools.

Your phone can check your calendar to know your status and route your calls accordingly. Your CRM can check your phone to know your recent interactions with a customer.

APIs break the barriers that forced productivity applications to work in silos, often with duplicated user data. Just think of how many copies of your contacts are managed by the different apps that you use – email contacts, telephone directory, social networks, CRM, etc.

Tell us about your Evatel business communications platform.
Speech Mobility built its Evatel business communications platform leveraging open APIs to provide seamless integration of telephony, messaging, speech, and CRM. This unique utilization of APIs to securely exchange user data between different office tools enabled Speech Mobility to offer its users multimodal communications and integrated collaboration  to make telephony smarter and mobility safer for business people on the go.

Security and privacy were among the top priorities addressed by Speech Mobility in its use of open APIs. Data encryption and single-sign-on are enforced each time private information is accessed or transmitted to third-party platforms such as mail systems (Google (News - Alert), Microsoft), phone systems (Asterisk, BroadSoft), and CRMs (Salesforce, Insightly).

As voice  communications and business applications continue to move to the cloud, the use of APIs to securely exchange data will be inevitable. Customers will expect it, and vendors will have to supply it.

What emerging technology has the potential to have a disruptive impact on businesses in the coming years?

Speech and AI will have the biggest impact on business communications.

Speech is still the most natural way to communicate and the safest while driving. It’s easier and faster to use than any other communication means. Why use a dial pad when you can just speak?

People call people, not numbers. So phones must be smart enough to reach people when and where they want to be reached. It’s about connecting people to people. This also means that the phone must know its users, their whereabouts, their important contacts, their time schedule, and their preferences to know when they’re working and when they’re not. Only very personal intelligent assistants can provide such services.

The adoption of AI and speech technologies in telecommunications will be accelerated by the growing need for more efficiency, more mobility, and more productivity.