I’m an enthusiastic user of VocaNOM so I figured it is time to get Eyal Zach, our VP Business Development for Mobility and VocaNOM answer some questions and tell our readers about the latest advances and plans for the application.
Eyal, tell us about VocaNOM and the target market?
VocaNOM allows employees to dial using their voice to request the destination rather than looking up the name of the requested contact-person in the company address book. This makes dialling fast and easy, and increases security while driving!
We are leveraging AudioCodes GW & SBC technologies to connect to any PBX (any vendor and any type of PBX – even to analog devices.).
VocaNOM is now available in the cloud. We are very excited to be the first company to provide a public cloud-based voice recognition service aimed specifically at enterprises. The service is already deployed with over one hundred customers from different business segments (universities, hospitals, high-tech and low-tech companies, municipalities and others). Since the service is specific per language, we are currently offering it in English (U.S.), Spanish, German and Hebrew. We are working on expanding the service to include additional languages.
You can read more about VocaNOM and watch our video clip.
VocaNOM was previously an on-premises product that was moved to the cloud. Can you provide more information about the motivation for this change?
We started offering the service in Israel a few years ago and mostly approached large-scale enterprises (1000+ employees). We did not approach smaller companies because of the cost of installation and management of an on-premises architecture. Once we started to get queries from smaller enterprises wanting to enjoy the same technology and benefits that VocaNOM offers, we started looking for ways to simplify the installation and configuration and reduce the time it takes to get a customer up and running. Now that the system runs as a hosted service in the cloud, we can offer it to a larger audience and easily scale on-the-go as required.
What are the benefits for the end customer in preferring the cloud service over the on-premises option?
The move to the cloud allows us to provide more options to our customers while lowering the barriers for adoption of the service by almost any enterprise.
From a customer perspective, using this service in the cloud instead of on-premises results in simplified management and maintenance while benefiting from a pay-as-you-go type of pricing model instead of a higher one-time fee. Additionally, since it runs in the cloud, the customer is freed from the need to handle version upgrades.
What is next for VocaNOM?
We recently launched a new mobile applications that support our customers’ private address book in addition to their corporate address book. We are working on other features that will be announced later this year that will extend the capabilities of that app beyond just dialling. We are receiving great feedback and ideas from our growing customer base and we are working hard to enhance and improve the product. We have also recently launched an online self-registration tool, allowing potential customers to try VocaNOM in less than a few minutes.
What are the key milestones for VocaNOM in the near future?
With the ongoing development of our enterprise service, including our mobile app and our online self-registration platform, we are excited to show these new features at the upcoming Mobile World Congress expo (MWC 2016).
We’re attending MWC16 to meet with European service providers and to expand our business offering across multiple countries, with a special focus on Germany and Spain.
Anyone who might be interested in meeting with us can drop me a line to schedule a short talk.
