Enterprise Communicationsvonage

A Visit to Vonage Labs Part1

by Dave Michels

Last month I was able to visit Vonage World Headquarters in Holmdel NJ.

For those you under 30,  Holmdel was the home of Bell Labs – sacred ground from a Telecom perspective. Bell Labs was located not too far away. I know my Bell history, but I’ve never been there. Co-Blogger Colin frequently writes about Bell on TalkingPointz.

Vonage has its own labs in Holmdel, and I met with Bryan Stokes there for some interesting demos. I can only share one demo now, but more are coming.

The demo below couples Amazon Chime Pro with Alexa for Business. Vonage was the first to offer Amazon Chime bundled with some of its UCaaS offers. The services (Chime and Alexa) are currently available, and Vonage Labs are evaluating additional ways to bring complementary skills to Alexa for Business to enhance office communications.
 

VonageSpeech from Dave Michels on Vimeo.

As far as I can tell, there’s going to be a lot of new speech interfaces introduced over the next few years. It’s the theme also for the Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect 2018. We got 18 submissions for the Showcase this year – Neither Vonage nor Amazon are eligible as the Showcase is limited to new-to-EC- companies. However, as Bryan shows, speech is perhaps the most obvious and intuitive UI for UCaaS services. Vonage offers technologies from both Cisco-BroadSoft and Amazon, both of which are committed to speech technologies.