Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / How Sanas Is Changing Contact Centers With Accent AI
Transcript
- Gina: Welcome back everybody. Today we're chatting with Tiffany O'Malley, the TSD channel sales person from Sonas. Tiffany, welcome back to the Tech Matchmaker. It's great to have you back. Tiffany O'Malley: it's so great to be back. We're huge fans of you and what you're doing and it's it's our pleasure. Gina: Awesome. For those who missed our last episode, can you give us a quick rundown on your background and introduce your team? Tiffany O'Malley: Absolutely. again, like like Gina said, Tiffany O'Malley, I'm based in Dallas Fort Worth area in Texas. I run the partnership sales at Sonus where I am feel so fortunate to to do my job. I joke with our CRO all the time. I'm like, I can't believe you pay me to do this. I just get to talk about Sonus Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: all day, which is it's it is such a joy for me. and I am really pleased to have a few women here with me. I was just telling Gina this is like an all-star girls show here. and these girls Gina: No Tiffany O'Malley: really are the celebrities of Sana. So I have Luzielle, she's based in the Philippines. I have Kathy, she's in Cameroon and Asha's in India. I'm gonna be introducing them a little bit more later to showcase what we do live, but really happy we have the whole globe covered here. Gina: Love it. And for anybody tuning in for the first time, Tiffany, can you give us a quick refresher? What is Sonus in a nutshell? Tiffany O'Malley: Yes. Yeah. So SANIS is a speech understanding platform. Our mission is to allow the world to communicate clearly, regardless of where someone lives, how they sound, where they're working. And I say mission because we are very much a mission-driven organization. I've actually heard our leadership say before that we would be a charity if we didn't have venture capital funding because it is just it's it's our heartbeat just to allow the world One to work and make a living for their family, but also just to remove barriers to communication. So we do that in a few ways. I'm going to show them to you today. Today we have a few different products in market. Our bread and butter accent translation, which we're going to walk through. This just removes barriers that come into place or some friction that comes into place when people have heavy accents. Most of the companies in the US today are outsourcing some part of their customer service operations. We know why they do that. You work with a lot of customers that do that. It makes a ton of financial sense, but sometimes it does just come with a little bit of risk to the customer experience. So that's what that product product solves. We have a product called Speech Enhancement. This takes a typical eight kilohertz telephony call. And makes it studio quality and addresses a few different issues that usually get introduced when you're on Wi-Fi or using microphone, stuff like that. Lisielle's gonna walk us through that. We have a product called language translation. This is this is replacing what the alternatives today are hiring someone who speaks multiple languages, which is very expensive, or something typical to like a language line. which a lot of companies use today where it brings in a third party. And so we're saying, hey, maybe t technology can bridge that gap. So I'll showcase that today and a couple more things coming down the pike that maybe we can talk about later. Gina: Excellent. Let's let's get into it. Let's see it in action. Tiffany O'Malley: Okay. thank you for the opportunity to show this. I told Gina earlier, like, I hate talking, I hate, you know, just either even showing slides. Are we we love for our products to speak for themselves? So thank you guys for listening and allowing me to show this to you. Actually, our our beautiful celebrities are gonna do that. like I said, accent translation, this is our core product, our bread and butter. This is what we invented and brought to the market a few years ago. And it's such a special product. So I want you guys to hear it for yourself, and then I can talk you. about some of the advancements that have happened on this product. But to do that, please meet Asha. Asha, why don't you introduce yourself to to Gina's audience? Asha: Sure. Thank you so much, Tishni and Gina. Nice to meet you. And I'm very excited today to showcase our magic of Sannus. So I'll be showcasing the accent translation and noise cancellation feature. So let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Asha and I'm from Maharashtra, which is in India. And I have around nine years of experience with technical support and healthcare. In my free time, I like to spend time with my kid doing a lot of activities together and playing badminton. So this is my natural voice without Sannus enabled. So I'll be running running some background noise that is typical call center noise so that you can see the noise elimination feature. I hope this is coming through. Great. So I have a needle Sanus and I'm sure you cannot hear any background noise, but it is still playing on my phone. Let me re reintroduce myself. My name is Asha and I'm joining you from Maharashtra, which is in India, and I have around nine years of experience with technical support and healthcare. In my free time I like to spend time with my kid doing a lot of activities together and playing backminton. So I hope you like this short demo. It's a very simple application. Installing at a stop, just one toggle button. And you can see the difference. So I hope you like it. And everyone like it. Thank you. Gina: That was great. Thank you so much. Tiffany O'Malley: I mean, Jeannie, you've been watching this product for years and I'm sure you've seen the the enhancements. Gina: I have it the advancements. Yeah, absolutely. Talk about those a little bit, Tiffany, because it has improved. Absolutely. Tiffany O'Malley: Yeah, you know, when we invented this, it was it took them about three years to build the first model, which was India. As you can imagine, it is highly complicated language with lots of different dialects, I think over 400 different dialects. So very, very complicated. And then as you can imagine, you're building all of this on a tiny model to run on a machine and you can't have any latency. You know, we couldn't be a market if we had any latency. So while we present it very simply as a as a solution, it is quite complicated. So some of the enhancements that have happened just over the last year are and this was a question we got a lot. yes, we can understand the agent better, but there are agents sitting in India or different parts of the world and they're speaking to someone in Louisiana, they can't understand them, right? So we've always kind of thought about it one-sided. so with our introduction of universal accent translation, it covers a couple of things. One, it now works on both sides. So regardless of where someone's calling from, the agent can now understand better. But two, we used to be geographically restrained or constrained. And and now this this universal model allows us to go into any region in the world, Europe, Asia, you know, Australia. We have customers down there. We even get questions about people with. big Southern or people in Boston. And so now this universal model is going to run on everything, which is really exciting. Yeah. Gina: Awesome. Fantastic. Tiffany O'Malley: This I love this product for a couple of reasons. Obviously, Gina, you work with customers all the time and it's really about the metrics within the contact center, the AHT, the CSAT, the first Gina: Mm-hmm. Tiffany O'Malley: call resolution, the revenue per call. All these are really important metrics that are touched by this tool. But there's also very human side. And this is what What makes us very passionate about why we do, because this has improving people's lives. I think last time I was on here I talked about a few different stories, but a couple that have really come to light. Well, let me let me s give one for each of these. Customer metrics, obviously you can hear the value. we just closed an opportunity with with someone you know, Gina, a hotel chain. And you know, this not a large hotel chain, maybe they have 20 or 40 places throughout the United States. But the metrics, some of the metrics they were following was someone would call in and we wanted to capture a little bit more revenue per call. Hey, while you're on, while you're upgrading your room, can you also add a cabana or add a a season pass or something like that? And so they they found that after two weeks into Asana's pilot, they were able to add an additional like just 40 bucks per call. Which is not a huge deal, but you know, to that to that, you know, line, that was a that was a really big marker for them and enough Gina: Mm-hmm. Tiffany O'Malley: to push them over the line. Where on the like the other end of the spectrum, we have someone like United Healthcare, who was one of our first large enterprise customers. And they were when we ran into them, well, a few years ago, they had been they had traditionally been doing all of their voice service in India, but Constant complaints by customers and patients. They had to move it. They had to go back to Canada. So when we ran into them, they were outsourcing through Canada, which was much more expensive. And by using Sonus, Gina: Mm-hmm. Tiffany O'Malley: they were able to send thousands and thousands of jobs to India now, which Gina, you know, we're we're all human. We love the opportunity to let people who weren't previously working be able to work. So I just love Gina: Stop on the day. Tiffany O'Malley: those type of stories as well. Gina: Definitely. Yeah, it's impressive what what and forty dollars per call is is nothing to shake your you know, nothing to shake your head at. I mean that's that's fantastic. I think most customers would be happy to have an upsell on that. Perfect. Tiffany O'Malley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. that's accent translation. Again, we love that product, but there are new things. So thank you, Gina, for the opportunity to share a couple of more things. let's go over to language translation. This is I mean, I I Gina, I know we you and I have talked to several customers. Like we said, the alternatives today are very expensive. So This is very new technology, you know, to the market in general. So it's been really exciting to see the different use cases for this. So in showing this, I thought we would let Gina and Kathy showcase the tool together, just having a conversation. Kathy in Cameroon, she's gonna share her screen so that you guys see what the agent is actually seeing, and I will hand it over to you. Cathy Ntamak: Thank you very much, Stephanie. So hi everyone. My name is Cathy and I can speak both English and French. To showcase Sanas language translation today, I will do a short introduction of myself in French first, just for you to make sure that I can speak French before I turn on Sanas. Okay? So, je m'appelle Cathy et je viens du Cameroun. Je parle très bien le français et l'anglais. J'ai étudié les soins infiniers et travaillé dans les industries pendant quelques années en tant qu'agent commercial. So now I'll turn on Sanas and share my screen so that I can have a short conversation with Cheena. Okay? Hi Gina, I hope you're doing well today. Gina: I am Kathy, thanks so much. I hope you're doing well as well. Cathy Ntamak: I'm doing really well. Thanks. I'm very pleased to meet you. How's your day going today? Gina: My day is going fantastic and it's my pleasure to meet you as well. I'm very happy to have you on the podcast. Cathy Ntamak: The pleasure is very shared. So, what are you planning to do this weekend? Gina: There's lots of plans on the on the schedule for this weekend, but I this is just incredible to see the back and forth. It's it's really impressive. Cathy Ntamak: Thank you very much. I'm very glad you like the app. So here's a little demonstration of what Sanis can do with languages. I hope you all enjoyed it. Well, thank you. Gina: Yeah, that's super impressive, Tiffany. Thanks so much, Kathy. Tiffany O'Malley: Yeah. Yeah. And as you can Cathy Ntamak: My pleasure. Tiffany O'Malley: see, there's a drop down there, several different languages. This will allow someone, no matter where they are in the world, Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: to with a single toggle switch, be able to speak multiple languages, obviously opening up the the the talent pool, allowing more people to get jobs, but also allowing a lot of organizations to save a ton of money. It's very expensive. Gina: Absolutely. Tiffany O'Malley: you know, the language line or multilingual agents are very expensive. So we typically see anywhere from a half, sometimes even a quarter of the cost, which we love. Gina: Excellent. Tiffany O'Malley: I will point out on that technology, you experienced a little bit, a little bit more of a delay, but it's it's not too significant. and the accent translation tool, no delay, 100 millisecond within language, we're seeing around a one to two second. And that's just so we can translate in context, as you know, you need to hear before you start translating. It's not word for word. So Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: we're really proud about how far that's come. We're actually beating open AI in our latency. so that's really cool and that the team has just been incredible that's been building that. Gina: Fantastic. And now I know we have one more on is it speech enhancement? Tiffany O'Malley: We yes, this yes, this is called speech enhancement. So this is a tool for anyone. You do not necessarily have to be living overseas. This could be for companies who have sent their workers home and they're working remotely. And this is there's been noise cancellation technologies in the market for a while. Think of this as noise cancellation on steroids. Like I said, this is taking a typical eight kilohertz telephony call, boosting it to twenty four kilohertz. basically making it a studio quality call. So Luziella is going to walk us through what she's going to do is she's going to create several different environments that most of us run into. You know, a connectivity issue, background noise, a bad microphone, things like that. So she'll, it might get a little noisy for a minute, but she'll introduce those and then she'll turn on speech enhancement after that. Luzziel Garcia_Sanas: OK, so I will take that as a cue. Tiffany, so hello everyone. I'm Luzy L and I will be demoing the Santa speech enhancement. So before I turn it on, I'm going to to absolutely try my very best to destroy my audio for you all by inserting different kinds of distortion. So it might be a little annoying for awhile, but first I will simulate a network connectivity issue. So by this time you can hear some choppiness in my voice or packet loss. And I will introduce echo and reverb, which can happen with sensitive microphone or you're in a large workspace or you're in a large room. And I will also add a low quality microphone, especially if you're having a cheap headset. And finally, I will add a background noise. So for the background noise, this is similar to what you can hear in a contact center. So at this point, we're experiencing network connectivity issue, echo, background noise, and low quality microphone all at once. So now I will be turning on the SANA speech enhancement, and we will see the difference. So there, as you can see, those audio issues are gone and my voice should sound much clearer and that's the power of using this SANAA speech enhancement. So I hope you like it and thank you. Gina: It's fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank all of you ladies so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Tiffany O'Malley: Yes, they they are truly the reason we exist and the reason I'm able to do what I do. So thank you, ladies. I really appreciate Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: it. I love I love that speech enhancement tool. It just continues to feed our mission of clear communication and it doesn't always have to look like accent or language. Gina: And it Yeah, and I mean that is something that happens all the time, right? So that it that that's such an incredible addition to the product suite. Tiffany O'Malley: Yeah. And it's a it's a really affordable, you know, it's a few bucks a month, but if you think about organizations who are, you know, some of are just spending two hundred dollars a year on headset. You know. Gina: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Tiffany, you guys also introduced speech intelligence this year, I think. Tiffany O'Malley: Yes, as you know, we were all in Vegas a couple of weeks ago at CCW, which was such an awesome Gina: And Tiffany O'Malley: show. And we typically take that time to introduce some new features. So speech intelligence was one of the new products that we released there. We're already using it within several of our BPO customers, but this is basically taking when you're already using a Sana's product, we have access to the voice stream, right? So what are the other things that you can do when you have access to the voice? And so, what we're really trying to do with speech intelligence is just bring actionable insights to an agent in real time. Several of these solutions exist within the CCAS solution or other post-interaction analytics or agent assist tools, but they're very one, they're all usually cloud-based. There's heavy integrations to get to the voice for to do redactions. The way we're offering it is on device, but it's really cool and just that the feedback has been incredible. And again, this is just a very it's a low cost feature to be able to again add add actionable insights, alerts for supervisors, again, PII redaction, all in real time. And it's it's very cool. Gina: Sonus also acquired tomato dotai this year. Can you talk a little bit about what that acquisition brings to the platform that maybe you guys didn't have before? Tiffany O'Malley: Yeah, yeah. So Tomato was another player in this space doing something similar and really excited about that. That's opening up basically a different vertical for us in that we are doing more integrations within telco within the networks. As you can imagine, all these things you've seen, we're deeply integrated into the CX side of businesses. But in telcos when you can deliver this to the network and you can push this out to your millions and millions of users. it's highly effective. So that's what we are doing with some of the team members that came over from Tomato. And they have massive pilots going on with some of the largest telcos in the world right now. So I think by the next time we meet, we'll probably have some other big news to share there. Gina: I love it. I love it. And not that we haven't been blown away by everything you guys have done in the last year, but what's next on the horizon for Sarannis? For Sannus. Tiffany O'Malley: That's yeah, that's that's a great question. and we have a we have a tool internally where you know we're all the time people are like, Hey, a customer asked about this and can we do this and this? So there are so many things going on. I think one of the things you're gonna see that we get asked a lot about is grammar. And Gina: No. Tiffany O'Malley: today we're not changing words, we are not generative AI, but this is This is an issue, obviously, within this demographic. So I think you'll see some things there. We also at CCW introduced a self-service capability. One of our, again, core values or low slogans within our company is March to a billion voices. Again, I say we're very mission-driven. We want the whole world to be able to communicate clearly. So we do now offer this ability for anyone to get access to Sonus. you know, previously it's large large enterprises, mid market, things like that. So if you want it for yourself, you go on, you just swipe a credit card and and start using it. Gina: I know you I the Sonas app helped us on our last vacation down in in Mexico. So I am a I am a user and a believer for sure. Tiffany O'Malley: Yes. Yes. That I'm glad you mentioned that. That that has had a ton of updates. If y'all have an iPhone or an Android, go to Sonus Translate. It's a free app. I use it nearly every week in my Uber Uber rides. And we've actually Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: had so many people. if you follow Sonus on Instagram, there are so many people at the World Cups. We're actually doing some heavy advertising at the World Cups because people can just have there's a live conversation mode. So you're you're Gina: Yeah. Tiffany O'Malley: sitting next to someone who doesn't speak your language and y'all can talk. Again, just feeding our mission. Gina: Yeah, it's it's fantastic. Is there anything else you'd like the audience to know, Tiffany, that I haven't asked you yet today? Tiffany O'Malley: I I feel like I've already already talked too much. I could talk all day about SANUS and our stories. Gina: Never Tiffany O'Malley: again, I I think I've I've let this be known, but our people are just so important to us in a world where there are so many tools that are trying to remove people from the equation. We want to be one of the companies that is adding jobs, adding to the GDP. Like I said, we're we're one world. And when we can look at different countries and we see their, you know, their job growth going up. Like it's just it's so heartwarming and to be a part of that. And I just again thank you for the platform to be able to talk about that. Gina: Absolutely, absolutely. Huge fan of what you guys are doing and and what the mission is there. And to wrap things up, you know the you know the drill with James Lipton. So what now noise or sound do you love? Tiffany O'Malley: gosh. a a dog barking. Puppies. Gina: Love it. What noise or sound do you hate? Tiffany O'Malley: gosh. man. Gina, I was trying to figure out your your rapid fire Gina: What? Tiffany O'Malley: questions before I got on here. Yeah, you know what is really annoying are really loud trucks on the roads. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like Gina: I do. Tiffany O'Malley: they should be outloid they should be out loud. Gina: And now what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Tiffany O'Malley: gosh, I couldn't anymore, but growing up I wanted to be a singer. Yeah. Whitney Houston. I will never be Gina: I love that. Love it. Tiffany O'Malley: her, but boy did I want to. Gina: Now, if somebody wants more information on using Sonus, who should they reach out to, Tiffany? Tiffany O'Malley: Well first start with you. You know, you are our our our go to and very strategic partner, but obviously find me on on LinkedIn, Tiffany O'Malley, would be happy to help you set you up with our team and I promise you you won't regret it. Gina: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming back and for the demo and for bringing the ladies with you. It's so much more meaningful to see than than hearabout. So thanks so much and I look forward I look forward to next year because it just seems to be getting better and better. Tiffany O'Malley: Thank you.