AI in Action: Current and Future Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Telephony

AI is everywhere and everyone is talking about it. At Rinkel, we’re doing a lot more than talk. We’re hard at work building AI solutions entrepreneurs like you can use without technical knowledge of AI and without going through a long, complicated IT project. In this article, we will show you 3 ways we’ve already built AI into our products and 4 ways AI will help us re-invent how we work in the near future. 

We’re always improving our products to help you and your employees do more and do better. Using AI, and especially the advanced language models that power applications like ChatGPT, already enables three applications that will improve both business and life for you and your employees: 

Writing call summaries is time-consuming and error-prone. If you do it immediately after the call, you are unavailable, and customers may have to wait. If you do it later, you will have forgotten important details. The current generation of AI models can accurately transcribe and summarize a phone conversation, providing lists of all action items, prices and dates mentioned. This is a great time saver for small, busy teams. 

On social media and chat services, sentiment analysis of customer interaction has been available for quite some time. With language models able to understand speech, we are bringing this capability to telephony. AI turns sentiment into structured, usable data to help you identify problems and steer your business in the right direction. 

With sentiment analysis, it’s important to note that this is a monitoring tool you can use to learn and develop your business and employees. It is not, and will never be, a mechanism for evaluating employee performance. Despite all the technology and data, it’s still tough to ‘measure a smile’. And, as everybody knows, there is just no pleasing every single customer that calls. We never want AI to judge what a person did. Only another person can do that. 

Transcribe and analyze phone conversations for a while, and patterns will emerge. Imagine getting an email every week, listing the topics your team discussed with customers, the questions people asked (plus the answers they got) and comparing these to last week’s topics. This is not some far-away reality. We are developing this and hope to release this functionality soon. 

These first three use cases start with converting speech to written text. But why stop here? The possibilities of working with call transcripts extend far beyond these three. AI transcription gives you a wealth of data that can be used by large language models (LLMs) like GPT. Our first steps now prepare us for the bigger things to come: 

Imagine searching not only your documents but your phone conversations. What did we agree on last week? What promises did we make? What date did we pick for the next meeting? Never listen to a phone recording – or bother a client with unnecessary questions - again. 

In the next step, information from a phone call can be added to a customer relationship management (CRM) or planning tool directly. Just saying you will do something will be enough to put it on your task list. Agreeing on an appointment with a customer will automatically put it on your schedule. Any materials or details mentioned will be sent to the employees who prepare and do the work. 

As you collect more data, you gain the power to see relationships between conversations and general trends. One angry customer is an incident. Two may be a coincidence. But a sudden jump in negative-sentiment phone calls may indicate something is seriously wrong with your product or service. With enough data, you can link the trend to an individual product, geographical region or customer segment. This way, AI will soon help you see what’s happening and take action. 

This may surprise you, but we don’t consider ourselves a telephony company. We’re in the business of helping you – the ambitious, hard-working entrepreneur - get where you want to go. We do that by developing the technology you need and making it easy to use. At some point in the future, you will have so much data on the questions customers ask you by phone that AI can answer most of them using the channel your customer prefers. Be it chat, email, video or text-to-speech. This will free up your busy staff to work on things that require affection and creativity, and that will help your business grow. We’re not there yet, but we will be in a couple of years. 

To learn how AI will impact your business and help you work smarter, better and more efficiently:

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