Frisco, Texas-based iOLAP, Inc., a strategic analytics consultancy specializing in big data, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence, has a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for iOLAP’s Enterprise Voice.
Amazon partnered with iOLAP to use their voice enterprise technology for Alexa for Business, according to Chris Jordan, iOLAP’s Founder and CEO. This move has attracted the attention of the financial services industry, as it enables many financial advisors to use voice technology to answer data related questions.
For example, if a financial advisor wants to gain access to a client’s profile, the voice enterprise technology can be activated by saying, “Alexa, can you brief me on customer X.”
While other companies were looking to streamline teleconferencing or use the Alexa for commands like turning on and off office lights, Jordan and his team focused its efforts to allow customer information access to their systems via voice commands. “We started playing with it to figure out -- how can we use this same interface, but for business?” he said. “The same types of databases that we’ve accessed for analytics purposes -- let’s try to go after them with our voice instead of with a mouse or touchscreen.”
When Amazon introduced the voice assistant Alexa and accompanying devices like the Echo and Echo Dot, iOLAP’s team immediately put it in their innovation lab and tried to figure out how to use it in an enterprise setting. “If you’ve got an Alexa device sitting in a room, anybody that comes in and asks a question is going to get the answer. You can’t have that in an enterprise setting,” Jordan said.
As a result, Jordan’s team at iOLAP developed a method to authenticate users based on an active directory built into the platform to enable access for appropriate users. The team also discovered issues involving device management for hundreds to thousands of devices across an entire business. Jordan and his team built in applications to interact on phones or through chatbot-like interfaces to gain more widespread use.
“We’re taking our years of domain experience and innovating with our clients to come up with personas and use cases and really develop those voice applications that become almost like another interface into all of the enterprise systems that they’ve already built,” Jordan said.
Jordan understands as more iOLAP customers seek new avenues for the technology, the more the company wants to innovate with AWS, and he is confident AWS will continue to push iOLAP to evolve further, faster. “We had our first proof of concept up and running within three months. We couldn’t have done that if it wasn’t for the platform and service that AWS had already built,” he said.
With iOLAP’s Enterprise Voice service, he explains that custom skill development allows voice access to internal employees, and/or external customers, through managed devices. In addition Enterprise Voice offers the ability to call up written reports, send notifications via email or text, and has integrated security protocols.
For companies looking to adopt voice recognition technology into their processes, Jordan suggests, “Start playing with voice, and see how it changes the way you interact with your systems.” Jordan stresses that the best way to make discoveries is to simply “jump in.”