ENTERPRISE CONNECT — New voice technologies are set to revolutionize enterprises, and speech technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound effect on collaboration in the coming years.

That’s according to Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates. His session, during this week’s virtual Enterprise Connect, focused on how speech technology and AI are creating new value for enterprises. (Enterprise Connect and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.)

J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold

“Speech technology is now strategic in its core AI applications in the enterprise,” he said. “What did we do before AI? Voice was about telephony and P2P. Speech technology was about speech recognition and speaker recognition. Communications was about direct experiences and collaboration, and mostly in person. AI in the last two to three years has really changed things up. Voice is now a data stream analytics conversation with AI. This is the transformation effect that AI is going to have and speech is just part of that.”

Voice Remains Top App

Voice remains the most natural, human way to communicate, Arnold said. For the unified communications space, it’s the stickiest of all of the apps. The shift from TDM and legacy technology to VoIP has simply made the voice story bigger. And on the business side, voice still makes money for service providers.

“Voice is the mode or channel of communication,” he said. “Speech is the content of that communication. So voice and speech are not the same things. And every new layer of  AI creates new use cases and business value. So there are new ways that make voice value added with innovation. And separately from that, when you just talk about speech, when you digitize conversation, it opens up a whole new world of applications that really take speech into other realms of communication, particularly text-based forms of applications.”

The smart speaker market was flat last year, but adoption has reached 50%, Arnold said. Consumer leads the enterprise in this market, but enterprise will increasingly turn to this market and use cases for enterprise will increase.

Investigate our slideshow above for more from Jon Arnold and more Enterprise Connect news.