Almost 150 years after the world-changing event when Alexander Graham Bell sent the first spoken words down a telephone line, there are claims that the use and importance of electronic voice communications is declining. US Magazine, House work, reported in 2018: “For the first time ever, mobile voice call usage has declined. … There is more emphasis on internet usage and data plans are getting bigger while minutes are being thrown aside.”
However, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, digital technologies have increased the importance of language as a tool for business communication.
This incendiary post will refute the notion that voice is declining. It is demonstrated that the digitized voice and the ability to convert speech to text and vice versa, Mean Voice will play an increasingly important role as part of an integrated communication system. It enables organizations to work efficiently and effectively, communicating in a variety of ways both internally and externally to enhance the employee experience and support customer needs and business objectives.
In short, the time has come for a “new age of language” in which there is much tighter integration between voice and other enterprise applications and communication systems.
Development of business voice technology
Companies quickly recognized the power of language technology and used it early on. A major development from about the 1960s was the private automatic branch exchange (PABX). This allowed calls to be made directly to people within an organization and an operator could redirect calls.
Another development popular in both the corporate and consumer markets was the answering machine and voicemail: messages could be received in the absence of the intended recipient. Cellular phone technology emerged in the 1980s, freeing voice communications from fixed locations.
The next major breakthrough was the ability to digitize voice and transmit it asynchronously over packet data networks such as Ethernet and the Internet. Today we take IP telephony for granted, but in the early days it was often claimed that packet voice would never replace analog or digital voice synchronously carried on dedicated links.
It is this ability to store, deliver, and manipulate voice like any other digital information that has made many of the voice services in use today possible; Services that secure the future of language.
Voice today – a changed landscape
You don’t have to look far to see that the way we use voice communication has changed dramatically. Many private customers have given up their landline connections and only use mobile devices. In business, more and more employees are using their cell phones for both incoming and outgoing calls, bypassing the corporate phone system.
Voice-only teleconferencing has been almost completely replaced by video conferencing: a trend rapidly accelerated by the pandemic two years ago that made remote working the norm and eliminated almost all face-to-face communication.
In their personal lives, people are now more likely to text or instant message, or connect via video apps, rather than making quick calls to family or friends.
However, we tend to use voice technologies for purposes other than communicating with a fellow human being. The combination of speech recognition and artificial intelligence has created a world where we can order food, play a TV show or song, and more just by speaking to an internet-connected device.
Voice has a unique advantage over other communication channels: it’s hands-free and eye-free.
In Australia, 42% of adults say they use a voice assistant like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. 26% own a smart speaker. Of these, 67% use it daily and 88% weekly. 70% of users say it makes their life easier and 41% wouldn’t want to go back to life without a voice assistant.
And research shows that language is becoming increasingly important for businesses. A RingCentral study of 3,000 SME workers in multiple countries including Australia, 2022 State of Human Connections at Work found that 76% believe colleagues who use voice communications are better connected. 68% agreed that being connected online via voice or video calls is just as good as communicating in person for work-related tasks, and 69% agreed that people who make phone or video calls have better face-to-face relationships with co-workers.
The study concluded: “It is clear that voice communication is here to stay. Whether your team is working remotely, in the office, or both, encourage them to use voice communication more—that means picking up the phone instead of sending another email.”
Voice: Time for a new approach
Voice communication technology and the way we use it may have changed enormously in the 150 years since the telephone was invented, but people haven’t changed for thousands of years: the voice is still our primary means of communication. The way we, and businesses in particular, use technology to augment the capabilities of the human voice has evolved in many directions.
Now is the time to look at all the technologies and applications that involve language and say, “How do we maximize the potential of language to meet our business needs and find innovative ways to gain competitive advantage?”
Here are some examples.
Thomas Foods International Australia
Eventually, after a series of acquisitions, Thomas Foods International Australia had seven distinct and aging PABXs in seven locations, all connected by PSTN services that were about to be replaced by the NBN. It replaced them with a complete cloud phone system that offers voice and video conferencing, online meetings, and desktop and mobile apps, and deployed 175 endpoints across seven locations in less than three weeks. Now there is a single collaboration platform across isolated regional locations, endpoints can move seamlessly with users, and a myriad of different web-based collaboration tools are no longer required.
Auditor ANZ
Chartered Accountants ANZ (CA ANZ) has offices in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Kingdom. There is also a hybrid working policy: three days working from home, two days in the office, one of those days the entire team is in the office.
It has implemented a single unified communications platform for all of its operating countries and employees, supporting telephony, video and audio conferencing, contact centers, analytics and reporting, and integration with Microsoft Teams and Salesforce. Now employees anywhere in the world can grab a laptop, plug in a headset, and have all the resources they need to do their jobs.
mortgage choice
Mortgage Choice is an Australian franchisor with 430 mortgage brokerage franchisees. The hosted IP PBX had no integration with the main apps used by employees: Google Workspace, Zendesk for ticketing and HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics for CRM. It has replaced this with a cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering that natively integrates with all of these applications.
This has provided Mortgage Choice with an improved and consistent user and customer experience that aligns with and leverages its brand. It is now able to offer its franchisees access to a shared UCaaS platform with advanced features integrated with its automated lead assignment engine.
Introducing RingCentral
RingCentral is a leading provider of enterprise cloud communications and contact center solutions powered by its Message Video Phone (MVP) platform. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
RingCentral MVP is more flexible and less expensive than traditional on-premise PABX and video conferencing systems. It enables today’s mobile and distributed workforce to communicate, collaborate and connect across any mode, device and location.
RingCentral MVP is an open platform that offers pre-built integration with 275+ popular business applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams and 365 as well as Google Cloud and access to 6500+ custom apps developed with their API integration.
RingCentral offers two key products in its portfolio: RingCentral MVP, a UCaaS platform that includes team messaging, video conferencing, and a cloud phone system, and RingCentral Contact Center, a comprehensive, cloud-based customer engagement platform.
Conclusion
The voice is the most natural means of human communication. For over a century it was the main use for electronic communication.
Nowadays it has become possible to translate the content of the voice into electronic, digital information and use this data for all kinds of business purposes – including voiceprint verification, speech analysis and other AI applications – and generate speech from digital data.
These technologies open up possibilities for much tighter integration between language, other means of communication, and other systems. The full potential of this integration is still being exploited. It will be transformative.
Many companies already see the potential. Banking and financial services companies surveyed by the Center for the Future of Work in 2020 estimate that over the next five years they will generate 8.4% of their revenue from voice, retailers 8.2%, insurance 7.6%, travel and hospitality 7.2% and manufacturing 7%. To achieve these goals, respondents estimate that they will invest 3% of their revenue in building voice capabilities over the next five years.
What are your plans for realizing the full potential of today’s language technologies? Let RingCentral show you what’s possible. Contact us today.
