AWS launches interactive travel and hospitality experience with NLX
AWS is kicking off the year with a number of exciting news and collaborations, and we are here with all the juice!
This week, Conversational AI specialist NLX launched ‘The Showroom’, which is an interactive travel and hospitality experience that puts users in their customer’s shoes. This is backed up by AWS and it presents users with multimodal, chat, and voice capabilities that can improve levels of their customer service.
The showroom enables businesses to test drive what end-to-end, personalized, automated conversations would look like on a fully qualified Conversational AI platform, illustrated through use cases like check-in, upgrade booking, cancel a reservation, and other features.
Andrei Papancea, CEO and Chief Product Officer at NLX explained that “it’s no longer practical for major brands to take a single-channel approach to automated customer service”. With The Showroom, end-users can seamlessly transition back and forth from chat, to voice, to multimodal, friction-free while experiencing continuous engagement as they would with a live agent.
In another collaborative news, Carahsoft announces the availability of data protection and backup Solutions in AWS Marketplace.
Carahsoft is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider that supports Public Sector organizations across Federal, State, and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. This collaboration means that U.S. Public Sector customers will now have ease of access, flexible pricing terms, simplified billing, quick deployment, and license management.
Great times are ahead for Amazon Web Services!
Salesforce to slash 10% of its workforce worldwide
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Business software maker, Salesforce are the latest U.S. tech companies to announce major job cuts.
The last couple of months have seen the tech space experience several worker purges, and this week, Salesforce joins in by announcing that it will cut its headcount by 1- percent and close down some offices.
This announcement came through a letter that the co-CEO, Marc Benioff, issued to employees last week. This is not a surprising act when we consider the layoff pandemic going around, but it’s worth pointing out that Salesforce increased its workforce by over 50 percent during the pandemic.
Salesforce workers who lose their jobs will receive nearly five months of pay, health insurance, career resources, and other benefits, according to the company.
Salesforce has recorded slowing growth over the last few quarters, and its market capitalization has dropped to pre-pandemic levels of $134 billion. Without cutting its headcount, the company might not be able to meet its ambitious financial targets.
Shopify unveils ‘Chaos Monkey 2023’
2023 appears to be the year where Shopify disrupts the workplace, and its first tool is a new initiative called “Chaos Monkey 2023”.
Like many companies, Shopify is working to adjust to a post-pandemic economy, one that may be on the verge of a recession. The company is hoping “chaos engineering” will help it be more nimble and better able to move forward.
This week, it announced its new strategy of ending meetings that involve more than two people. Large meetings, of 50 or more staff, will be restricted to a specific time frame on Thursdays, with no meeting at all on Wednesdays. In addition, the company de-populated all of its public Slack channels, lowering their limits to 150 people per channel.
All of these appear chaotic, but it appears that’s the point Shopify is trying to make!
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Google to end Chrome support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1
Google also made the news this week, as it announces that it will end its technical and security support to the older Chrome version, Chrome 109 by January 15, 2023, and migrate to an updated version, Chrome 110.
Chrome 109 supports Windows 7, Windows 8, and 8.1 while the latest Chrome version will require Windows 10 or any higher version. Consequently, the users will have to update to Windows 10 as well to be able to receive updated security features from the Chrome browser, according to reports.
Although the older Chrome version will also exist and continue to function, the users of this operating system will not be eligible for the latest updates and upgraded features from Chrome.
Microsoft is considering adding ChatGPT to its Bing Search engine
Interesting news has been linked to Microsoft, as it appears like they are considering integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in an effort to boost its attractiveness. The plan, first revealed by The Informer, appears to be in the early stages at the moment.
ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that is created specifically for dialogs. Microsoft seems to be considering integrating ChatGPT more deeply into Bing. The conversational nature of ChatGPT could help the company better understand user requests, and users of Bing might favor conversational answers over traditional search results.
In the long run, the decision of whether to integrate a language model like ChatGPT into a search engine would depend on a variety of factors, including the specific goals and needs of the search engine, as well as the potential benefits and challenges of such an integration. However, it seems to be a good idea on the surface level.
Adobe launches Enhance Speech, a free service to studio recordings
Adobe has launched a free Enhance Speech service that uses a special AI algorithm to cleanse speech recordings of extraneous noise and improve sound quality.
Adobe presents this service that’s already available to anyone who wants to enhance their podcasts, audio to video, and other recordings.
According to Adobe, the featured service is capable of taking recordings made with an average microphone to the point where they sound like they were recorded in a professional studio. Enhance Speech is free to use but requires an Adobe account to interact with.
Enhance Speech is reportedly part of the Adobe Podcast project aimed at podcast creators, and we’re excited to see what’s to come!
Allegion finalizes acquisition of workforce management solution platform Plano
Allegion, which is a leading global security product and solutions provider, has through one of its subsidiaries, completed its previously announced acquisition of Plano, a SaaS workforce management solution provider.
Plano has been a long-time service provider and development partner for Allegion’s leading European workforce management brand, Interflex, and its SP-EXPERT software platform. Now a part of Interflex’s portfolio, Plano will continue to serve advanced workforce management customers.
Allegion announced its intent to purchase Plano in November 2022, and we are glad that they could finalize the acquisition this week!
RateGain enters into an agreement to acquire Adara
RateGain Travel Technologies, a provider of SaaS solutions for travel and hospitality, announced this week that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Adara through an asset purchase agreement.
RateGain opined that with digital channels playing a ‘significant’ role in influencing travel decisions, it is critical for marketers and commercial teams to look at ways to capture intent accurately and target the right audience to increase the ROI on their marketing investments.
For them, the integration with Adara will further this to create a unique value proposition that the industry needs, as more and more travelers adopt digital channels to research, plan, and book travel.
That’s all from us for this week! More coming your way next week!