Another big week in the world of CX has seen the apparent confirmation of a Playvox-NICE takeover, a significant strategic revelation from Nuance, and AI releases from Avaya and Twilio.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Playvox Confirms NICE Takeover with a Name Change
Playvox has confirmed that it’s now part of NICE after changing its name on social media to Playvox by NICE.
The move comes after CX Today shared rumors of a potential acquisition in July.
A formal announcement from NICE is likely in the works, as the CCaaS and workforce engagement management (WEM) stalwart hasn’t yet responded to CX Today’s request for comment.
When that announcement comes, NICE will take over one of its most prominent competitors in the WEM market.
Indeed, Playvox has gained a significant market presence over the past decade, especially after its 2021 acquisition of Agyle Time, the workforce management (WFM) provider.
Alongside that WFM software, Playvox offers quality assurance (QA), coaching, and gamification solutions
Of course, NICE already has all this, so some may raise an eyebrow at the news. However, beyond bolstering its portfolio, the acquisition benefits NICE in several ways (Read on…).
Nuance to Stop Supporting On-Premise Contact Centers: Now What?
Nuance Communications is ending its support for its on-premise contact center IVR solutions.
While Nuance hasn’t made any public announcements on the matter, its partners and customers have shared statements from the company with CX Today.
The first dates to the start of August, when Nuance gave the following announcement to insiders:
We will discontinue the sale of Nuance Enterprise hosted and on-premise license products on August 9, 2024. This decision supports our commitment to providing maximum value to our customers through Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Azure AI services.
Amongst those products is the Dialog module, which will most interest Nuance’s contact center customers. It forms the basis of many worldwide natural language, on-premise IVR implementations.
That module comprises of two primary solutions: Recognizer, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, and Vocalizer, a text-to-speech (TTS) solution (Read on…).
Avaya Announces Two AI-Heavy Bundles for On-Premise Contact Centers
Avaya has released two new bundles for its on-premise Avaya Experience Platform (AXP) customers.
The bundles aim to give those customers new AI and public cloud capabilities while allowing them to keep their core contact center platforms on-premise.
In releasing the packages, Avaya is again delivering on its “innovation without disruption” strategy.
After all, customers can choose the best-fit bundle and layer it over their existing infrastructure.
The first package is AXP Essentials. It offers a starting point for Avaya customers to build on what they already have, with noise removal, real-time transcription, and agent-assist capabilities.
Also available within the bundle is a unified desktop, “advanced” workflow integrations, and connectors to CRM systems, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics.
Avaya also mentions journey orchestration tools, which likely stem from its recent Edify roll-up, and an open framework to integrate a third-party virtual agent into the Avaya environment.
The second bundle is AXP Advanced. It offers everything Essentials does, alongside additional digital channels and an “omnichannel experience” (Read on…).
Twilio Taps OpenAI’s Realtime API, Expands Its Conversational AI Capabilities
Twilio has added the new Realtime API from OpenAI to its Communications Platform.
The API facilitates natural speech-to-speech interactions – similar to how the Advanced Voice Mode works within ChatGPT – and comes with preset voices.
With the API, developers can pass any text or audio into GPT-4o and have the model respond via either medium or both.
In serving up this capability, Twilio hopes to allow its customers to build out automated customer experiences that blend voice, messaging, and possibly languages, too.
Such customer journeys will leverage the full capabilities of the modern smartphone alongside the next generation of large language models (LLMs).
Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, shared her excitement at taking the relationship to the next level and enabling developers to build new experiences:
Businesses can use this to create voice experiences that feel more human and can reduce operational costs and drive higher customer satisfaction.
Twilio also promises that automated conversations will feel “more like real human dialog”, as the Realtime API lowers latency. It also considers conversation pacing, tone, and interruption handling to enable a better balance between speaking and listening (Read on…).
