Conversational AI company Uniphore leverages Red Box acquisition for new data collection tool

Red Box provides the open architecture for data capture. Uniphore then transmits this data to U-Capture, its conversational AI automation tool.

In February 2023, conversation analytics company Uniphore acquired voice recording company Red Box. Today, the result of that partnership has emerged: U-Capture, an AI-powered metadata solution for data collected across the enterprise. U-Capture is available starting Tuesday in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia-Pacific region.

U-Capture will be delivered as part of Uniphore’s existing X platform and will provide real-time AI-ready data for conversation automation and analytics. U-Capture is notable because it’s a practical use for an AI assistant combined with existing data logging tools, but security remains a concern for Uniphore, which touts its platform as being native for AI. Uniphore has generated a lot of buzz in 2022 thanks to a $400 million funding round and support from Cisco CEO John Chambers.

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U-Capture leverages Red Box’s data logging capabilities

One of the problems Uniphore wanted to solve through the acquisition of Red Box was that much of the call center data was unstructured. It was multimodal: some might be video, some might be audio, some might be text.

U-Capture collects data from call center conversations or other professional audio or video recordings such as meetings. Then, U-Capture applies automation and connected applications to understand and reformat the content to provide coaching, analysis, or personalized responses (Figure A).

Figure A

The tool also applies so-called emotional AI, which can read the feeling and tailor its suggestions and coaching to that feeling. For example, the AI ​​system can allow an angry customer to navigate a welcome message on a phone tree to direct them more quickly to a human agent, then coach that agent on how to respond.

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“We have redesigned the Red Box functionality on our platform, which is now called and sold as U-Capture,” Uniphore CEO Umesh Sachdev said in an interview with TechRepublic. “Unlike a data company that just bought an AI platform, we are an AI company that, through an acquisition, got a data platform,” said Sachdev.

Part of Red Box’s appeal: open architecture

Some companies that sell contact center software are not permitted by their vendors to extract their own call center audio and use it for analysis; Uniphore wanted to open up the possibilities for using this data, while keeping it secure.

“Red Box was the third largest player in the call center, audio streaming, recording and capture segment, and Red Box was the only player in the segment globally that announced on its website that it “It was an open architecture,” Sachdev said. “So this was the very philosophy we were looking for to take control of our own destiny. We do not need to depend on a third party data provider to provide us with data.

“With Red Box, we have access to some of the world’s most openly formatted data on recording, capturing and streaming in the call center. We had access to a tremendous management team and the talent they built,” Sachdev said.

Other new features coming to the X Platform today include natural language generation to summarize discussions and intent formation for business analysis.

How Uniphore addresses security and data sharing concerns

Umesh noted that a public AI like ChatGPT is not particularly useful for a highly regulated company in finance or telecommunications; some of Uniphore’s largest customers are in these areas. So keeping data within the company is both safer and more practical than handing it over to a generative AI that trains itself across the entire Internet. But there are benefits to keeping some data open, Umesh said.

“Our customers contractually allow us to learn and improve our models from the data that flows through our system, provided that it is anonymized and aggregated at all times,” Sachdev said. “At no time does the AI ​​model know the source of this data. It can never be traced back to an individual customer or their history…it is a series of trends or patterns.

Uniphore integrates data deletion into its monitoring software, which means that personal data such as credit card numbers are hidden.

Data from customer call centers is open as it flows through an API framework. Uniphore and the client company are free to use this data for whatever analytics they wish to run on it, whether through Uniphore or a third-party AI provider.

“Enterprises are increasingly interested in generative AI applications, and we will see an explosion in the number of applications within the enterprise across different departments using generative AI,” said Umesh . “So these companies need a data layer that is open, fast and transparent (and) secure and reliable.”