InterviewUC&C22 Feb 2023 · 10 min read

UC Round Table: Improving Video Engagement With AI

AI is improving video engagement in UC and collaboration, with Vbrick, RingCentral, Mitel and Vonage on captions, translation and noise reduction.

Ryan Smith

Significant improvements to AI technology in recent years have prompted many organisations to consider how it can be applied to their product offering.

Within the unified communication and collaboration industry, AI already plays a key role in features such as automatic captions or transcribing video calls.

Many vendors in the UC & C space have highlighted the growth of AI as a key trend for 2023, something which has been spurred on by Microsoft and Google entering an "arms race" to be the dominant player in the AI field.

With our latest Round Table topic, "Improving Video Engagement With AI", we spoke with executives from Vbrick, RingCentral, Mitel, and Vonage to look at how AI can enhance video collaboration, the challenges vendors face, and what upcoming trends they are seeing.

How do you use AI to enhance video collaboration's quality, efficiency, and engagement?

Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick

[caption id="attachment_48694" align="alignright" width="210"] Paul Sparta[/caption]

"Video offers an extremely efficient and engaging way to transfer knowledge, communicate, conduct training sessions, and more. But when employees are unable to access video content due to language barriers, or simply not being able to find the relevant info, the benefits are lost.

"Vbrick’s video AI technology unlocks the value that oftentimes gets trapped in a company’s video library.

"Using facial recognition, machine transcription, and real-time translation, we are able to enrich video content with information about who appears in the video and what’s being said, while translating live video subtitles and transcripts into over 48 languages and on-demand content into over 61 languages.

"This allows employees to easily search for relevant video content while breaking down comprehension barriers and improving accessibility for all."

Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral

"RingCentral is tapping into the power of AI to address key challenges that are prevalent across every industry, every business size, every department - globally.

"Automating repetitive tasks: RingCentral’s AI-powered conversation intelligence automates repetitive and menial tasks to free up time to focus on more complex and strategic work.

"Predictive analytics and business insights: RingCentral provides AI to help organizations analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and predict future outcomes.

"Personalization: RingCentral’s AI analyzes mountains of unstructured data to create personalized recommendations, such as soft skills sales coaching.

"Fraud and spam detection: With proprietary spam detection AI and integrations with powerful AI technologies, RingCentral helps organizations avoid significant financial consequences and spam calls.

"Customer service: AI-powered chatbots and real-time guidance enable instant assistance and help organizations improve first-touch resolutions, customer satisfaction, and retention.

"Quality control: RingCentral has powerful AI noise reduction to minimize disruptions across meetings and calls."

Amitha Pulijala, Vice President of Product, AI, Video, and Platform Services, Vonage

"AI is shaping the collaboration space by making video calls more engaging. At Vonage, we are leveraging AI/ML in our Vonage Meetings video conferencing solution and via the Vonage Video API to enhance the video engagement for our customers with features such as Background Blur/Background removal, background filters, voice transcription/ live captions, light correction and noise cancellation.

"We have seen AI in video engagement increase participant engagement in many use cases and across industries, including

[caption id="attachment_48692" align="alignright" width="194"] Amitha Pulijala[/caption]

education and healthcare, among others. Depending on how the AI features are implemented, AI media processing is done on the client side for a better client experience.

"For features such as background filters, the quality of the feature depends on the device. If customers use devices with good processing capacity, they will have superior video engagement experiences when they turn on these AI features.

"In addition to out-of-the-box AI features, Vonage also provides AI connectors to third-party AI tools via the Vonage Video API which provides customers with the ability to integrate with a wide variety of AI features from different vendors in the video engagement.

"Vonage also provides media processing ML libraries for developers to apply their own custom video transformation in their real-time video applications (especially useful to build video transformations in AR/VR environments)."

Swapan Nandi, Sr. Director, Next Gen Solutions, Mitel

"AI offers significant potential to improve virtual meeting experiences and facilitate more effective work collaboration.

"The technology is already being used to enhance the quality of video calls by adding features such as active participant framing, virtual backgrounds, and improving picture quality.

"We are also using AI to enhance the audio quality of the calls through capabilities such as active noise cancellation and acoustic fencing as well as filtering out distracting background sounds from cars, paper shuffling and street noise.

"As organisations are looking to create more human-like virtual meeting experiences, there will be more focus on combining video conferencing with AI to make video calls more intuitive and productive via built-in digital assistants that take notes, record action items, and schedule follow-up calls/meetings."

What are some of AI's current challenges or limitations in video collaboration, and how do you overcome them?

Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral

[caption id="attachment_48695" align="alignleft" width="213"] Esther Yoon[/caption]

"Some of AI's current challenges typically lie around confidence in accuracy levels typically. The great news is that AI leverages machine learning to continue to improve and better process large amounts of information - much more accurately.

"We’re seeing a much wider acceptance of AI and love how ChatGPT is driving broader interest in AI applications.

"Through AI, we address one of the main challenges for hybrid employees: meeting overload. Our AI-generated meeting insights and summaries help users tame their meetings and feel less guilty or behind if a meeting is missed.

"The summaries are available in multiple formats to adapt to the users’ needs: video highlight reel, cliff notes, full transcript."

Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick

"While technologies like transcription and translation have improved by leaps and bounds, they’re not perfect and they’re not going to recognize internal corporate jargon and acronyms.

"We add a human-in-the-loop in two areas to help improve caption quality.

"The first is to allow our customers to define the names of speakers, products, business units or acronyms in advance. That allows us to train the transcription algorithm to recognize those terms and even whether they should be capitalized.

"We also let our customers edit those captions to ensure the highest possible quality while using AI to do the lion’s share of the work."

Swapan Nandi, Sr. Director, Next Gen Solutions, Mitel

"AI can be transformational for work collaboration and productivity. However, to be able to take advantage of the opportunities it offers, organisations need to resolve a few challenges including issues with privacy and security, data governance and data quality.

"For instance, AI will have the potential to identify human participants in video conference meetings by using face recognition.

"While this could be beneficial for allocating actions and improving the virtual meeting experience, the user privacy implications can pose challenges to the widespread adoption of this technology.

"Similarly, the integration with third-party applications will require businesses to ensure the quality of the data used to feed AI algorithms is good enough to ensure optimal performance.

"Maintaining high privacy and data governance standards will be key to addressing these challenges as well as establishing strong security mechanisms that safeguard the data regardless of where it resides."

What are some of AI's emerging trends or opportunities in video collaboration, and how do you leverage them?

Amitha Pulijala, Vice President of Product, AI, Video, and Platform Services, Vonage

"Video indexing is a feature with a lot of potential as you can search the video and create meaningful content out of it, like generating summaries, a useful feature in healthcare and education, generating educational content from training videos, creating content in different languages etc."

Swapan Nandi, Sr. Director, Next Gen Solutions, Mitel

"One of the biggest opportunities of AI lies in driving productivity and collaboration through closer integration of video conferencing technology with business management applications.

"For instance, AI can be fully integrated within a collaborative environment and in every channel used for data storage and communication, enabling the technology to transcribe conference calls, share translations, allocate actions, and send reminders on sensitive items to relevant participants.

"In the future, AI would handle many of the routine tasks that are currently handled by the call organiser. For instance, when a scheduled meeting approaches the end time, the organiser might suggest a follow-up meeting.

[caption id="attachment_48706" align="alignleft" width="252"] Swapan Nandi[/caption]

"This request will trigger the AI to check calendars and suggest a time when all participants are free to meet again. Generative AI could also play a significant role as a “silent” meeting participant by helping answer questions that might arise during a meeting – based on both public knowledge as well as internal Enterprise data – for which normally an action item would be assigned to someone to research the topic and return with answers and/or options.

"AI, combined with video conferencing, will also be used to improve professional development and accreditation by identifying knowledge gaps based on employee questions and providing relevant articles and other content to help train and upskill employees faster.

"As AI gets smarter, it will be able to identify what an employee needs to know based on their role and deliver personalized training via augmented reality (AR).

"For example, if you’re a technician, and you’re stuck with a problem – an AR-enhanced videoconference could connect you with a colleague who can help you solve it. AR will be also a major boon to remote training, particularly when in-person training is more difficult or expensive.

"All these use cases will require seamless integration with multiple third-party applications. Mitel has a long history of third-party integration with applications such as Outlook, CRM, AI Bot platforms, vertical business applications and many more.

"We are continuing to enhance these capabilities to ensure our video conferencing solutions are simple to use and can help end users drive productivity.

"Only by bringing together data insights from multiple sources can we realise the full potential of AI in video collaboration and make the user experience as seamless as possible."

Paul Sparta, CEO, Vbrick

"Trending globalization, improving accessibility, and an increasing focus on diversity and inclusion initiatives continue to drive requirements to offer additional AI capabilities for video content.

"We believe there is a wealth of untapped knowledge in videos across the enterprise, whether it’s in live events, recorded meetings, or help resources; and, we want to make these assets extremely discoverable.

"While Vbrick already offers AI-powered transcription and translation, we believe there’s more to do in helping people consume audio in their native tongue through audio translation, audio description, and ASL support for video content.

"Expanding these capabilities will be a priority for Vbrick in the year ahead.

Esther Yoon, VP of Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral

"In the near future, AI is becoming a tool that is going to help people make sense of mountains of unstructured data, such as voice calls, video meetings, and more - at scale.

"This means that organizations will have access to information that they never had access to and will be able to provide powerful insights on making timely business decisions.

"AI technology is evolving fast, and we are continuously finding ways to leverage it to improve the whole video collaboration experience: before, during and after meetings - in addition to all the different ways we communicate across a continuum.

"Companies should also keep an eye on the use of video to improve customer experience. Agents and customers can elevate conversations from real-time messaging into video conversations to solve problems in real time. By providing more context, AI can help in this process."

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