As a gamer, I'm always amazed by how realistic the modern gaming experience is. I'm currently playing the latest God of War on the PS4, in stunning 4k resolution. I can't help thinking about how far we've come since the video games of my childhood. I vividly remember playing Adventure on my Atari 2600, where your character was represented by a small square able to move from room to room, picking up things that kind of looked like a key or a sword. Pretty amazing transformation since then.
This intense graphic realism has made "virtual reality" an extremely viable technology. Virtual reality is about total immersion into a programmed world. You wear a visor/goggles that presents completely rendered content. Sensors detect your position and head movement and adjust your eyes' view based on where your head is positioned. Headphones feed that same spatially adjusted sound also based on your head's position and direction. There are only a few big players in the consumer side of this space. The HTC Vive and Occulus Rift are the two biggest products. There are some smaller ones out there that have interesting niches, such as Sony's PSVR for the PS4 gaming console.
Augmented reality, on the other hand, doesn't replace what your eyes would see by themselves. As the name implies, it augments existing reality with additional visualized data. Maybe it's simply a heads-up display, identifying interesting information about things in your field of view. Or maybe it's adding rendered images on top of your existing, non-rendered view. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality actually has to figure out what you can already see, determine exactly what those objects are, where they are, and keep track of them as they're moving, all while keeping them relative to your current head position.
There are some comparisons that could be made to the enterprise communication space. I wouldn't exactly call these use cases virtual reality or augmented reality, in the purest form, but we've seen examples where user interfaces have been radically rethought, based on types of gaming platforms. For example, back in 2011, Avaya introduced web.alive, which provided a virtual environment intended to give a more immersive enterprise collaboration experience. While it tried to recreate the way you collaborate in real life (e.g., walking into a conference room to access a shared screen, closing the door for privacy, and adding remote people via the conference phone on the desk), people just weren't interested in that type of experience.
I’m intrigued by the idea of augmented reality in enterprise communications. The core idea of having smart software paying attention to my interactions with others, in real-time, so that they can be more effective, would be wildly helpful. With products like Breeze Real-Time Speech Search, combined with artificial intelligence, I can have software listen to an agent or a caller and dynamically offer suggestions to the agent to augment their skill set. These suggestions could show up on their Agent Desktop or even be whispered into their ear, much like what we would do with an agent supervisor observing an interaction. For example, we could easily show or say something like, "Your caller seems to be interested in receiving their account balance. It is $23,887.12. Press the send button on your screen if they would like you to text it to the mobile phone number we have on file, which is 612.112.2233.” Not only does it pick up on cues that a new agent might not have been tuned in to hearing, but we can also save the agent several steps by automatically looking up the account balance and mobile phone, and give them a single-button method of sending it to the customer. The possibilities are endless.
Artificial intelligence is critical here. You can't (and don't want to) have to script every possible scenario. Natural language processing can help identify intent. AI conversation tools can help predict and assist with the response from that intent. You need machine learning to let the software get smarter with each interaction. In this type of use case, we're not replacing human agents, we're augmenting them.
ConvergeOne is already a leader in this space. Our R&D and Advanced Services teams have strong expertise in the types of workflow engines (like Breeze and ServiceNow) and Artificial Intelligence platforms (wit.ai, Amazon Lex, and IBM Watson) that are needed to turn these concepts from a fun, futuristic sci-fi movie to today's reality. Our ConvergeOne Chat Bot has the ability to do these kinds of things, both in customer-facing environments (intelligently interacting with the customer, and escalating to an agent when needed) or agent-facing ones (to provide real-time, contextually aware intelligence and automation to the agent). These types of engagements can be equally useful for unified communications and collaboration interactions, too. We're working with customers and teams to make their interactions more positive and more effective to drive better outcomes.
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