Archive for November 19, 2019

“Hey Einstein”— Salesforce Brings Voice to Every Customer Experience

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 19, 2019 by itnerd

Salesforce is bringing the power of voice to every customer experience spanning the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and enabling millions of CRM users to talk to Salesforce. With Einstein Voice Assistant guiding every action, insight and prediction, Salesforce users will be more productive—from anywhere. And new Einstein Voice Skills will enable developers and admins to build custom voice-powered apps for employees across every role and industry, in just a matter of clicks. In addition, new solutions for service and sales teams will apply natural language processing to voice conversations, and deliver insights that drive smarter, more personalized customer engagement.

Voice Enters the Workplace

Voice is rapidly emerging as the user interface for our lives. Nearly half of U.S. households are already using a voice-activated device for everyday activities like getting driving directions, dictating text messages, playing their favorite songs and even turning on home appliances – all without lifting a finger or tapping a keyboard. And, just like every other computing revolution that came before it—cloud, social, mobile and AI—Salesforce is helping companies bring voice’s immense potential to CRM to transform the way we work.

Talk to Salesforce Anytime, Anywhere with Einstein Voice

Last year at Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce introduced Einstein Voice Assistant, allowing sales reps to talk to Salesforce. With Einstein Voice Assistant, routine CRM transactions – creating or updating customer records, getting personalized daily briefings and exploring dashboards – can be done conversationally, so sales reps can keep their business moving forward and focus on what matters most, customer success.

But every employee can use a guide to help them be more productive and provide a smarter, more frictionless way to ask questions, get insights and predictions or initiate a task. Today, Salesforce announced it will expand the capabilities of Einstein Voice Assistant for any role or industry, giving every app built on Salesforce a voice. This is powered by new Einstein Voice Skills, which will empower admins and developers to create custom voice apps across the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform in just a few clicks.

Build Custom Voice Apps for Any Business Process

Using Einstein Voice Skills, companies will be able to create custom voice-powered apps to reimagine workflows and processes—replacing any manual data entry or manual Salesforce navigation that may impede productivity. From a simple set-up page, developers and admins will be able to build custom skills for any CRM action—such as updating a field, creating a task or reading out a prediction—and select the Salesforce fields or objects that inform each action.

For example, an admin or developer can build a custom voice-powered assistant for a field technician that enables her to verbally and instantly check on a service history while en route to her next customer, Acme, just by saying “Hey Einstein, what is Acme’s recent service history?” Meanwhile, admins can also build and deploy a separate, custom voice app for service managers that has a seat at the table for weekly leadership meetings, offering insight on open service cases in top regions, guidance on the team’s overall CSAT performance and more. Each app is purpose-built for the specific needs and processes of each role. Plus, admins can also control how information will be read back to the user, including the ability to offer next steps or follow-up tasks within the response, and which channels and devices that the skill is accessible on, such smart speakers or phones.

Voice Intelligence: Smarter and More Productive Service and Sales Experiences

Powered by Einstein, new voice intelligence applies natural language processing to call transcriptions – providing sales and service teams with insights and trends that will drive smarter, more personalized customer engagement:

  • New Service Cloud Voice: Service Cloud Voice integrates telephony inside Service Cloud, unifying phone, digital channels and CRM data in real-time in one centralized console. Service Cloud Voice can also integrate with transcription services  that convert voice to text in real time, enabling Einstein to serve up relevant AI-powered recommended responses, knowledge articles and next best actions as service agents are on voice calls.
  • New Einstein Call Coaching: Now with Einstein Call Coaching, our newest Sales Cloud capability, managers are able to see insights and trends within conversational data. Natural language processing identifies keywords in sales call transcripts, alerting managers to trends like a spike in competitor mentions, or best practices on topics like objection handling or pricing discussions. Those insights can then be used to provide sales reps with personalized coaching on how to improve the customer buying experience.

Voice Interoperability: Einstein Voice for Any Device 

In September, Salesforce joined Amazon and leading technology companies to announce the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a new program to ensure voice-enabled products provide customers with choice and flexibility through multiple, interoperable voice services. As part of this, Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills will be compatible with a variety of devices, from smart speakers to smartphones–whether it’s the Einstein Smart Speaker that will be unveiled at Dreamforce 2019 (not for sale), the new Salesforce Mobile App, or customers’ preferred devices.

Einstein at Dreamforce 

Check out the latest innovations from Einstein at Dreamforce, November 19-22, 2019. Chief Scientist Richard Socher will host a visionary keyote (Tuesday, November 19, 4:30 PM PT in Moscone West) on the future of AI and a first look at the new era of customer experiences that Voice will enable. Join us for the Einstein keynote (Wednesday, November 20, 9:00 AM PT in Moscone North) to learn more about Einstein Voice, and visit us at the Einstein Summit on the third floor of Moscone West.

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Keyfactor Brings Enhanced Security for Cloud, DevOps and IoT

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 19, 2019 by itnerd

Keyfactor, the leader in securing digital identities, today announced the latest update to its award-winning PKI (public key infrastructure) as-a-service and certificate lifecycle automation solution, Keyfactor Command. The offering supports information security, IT and DevOps teams juggling security priorities, regulatory demands and digital transformation.

In a recent survey, 44 percent of security and IT professionals indicated that lack of skills and expertise is the greatest challenge they face in managing their organization’s PKI, with 37 percent of respondents citing the secure adoption of DevOps, cloud and IoT as a primary concern.

According to Gartner Inc., the world’s leading research and advisory company, “technical professionals tasked with delivering effective identity and access management (IAM) capabilities should: establish a PKI management regime and leverage certificate management tools to manage and monitor SSL/TLS certificates, and focus on enabling automatic outage detection and mitigation, compliance and policy requirements and crypto-agility.”

We believe Keyfactor provides the most complete PKI operations solution delivered from the cloud, enabling both enterprise security teams and IoT device manufacturers to operate end-to-end agile digital identity management. This release includes improvements to discovery and auditing across the entire digital certificate landscape – critical capabilities required to meet regulatory and security mandates.

Key advancements include:

  • Secure Automation – Integrates with CyberArk to enable secure access to privileged accounts required for certificate and key lifecycle automation.
  • Improved Tracking and Auditing – Enables auditors to retrieve a complete audit log of every user activity and configuration change within the platform.
  • Extended Discovery – Expands certificate discovery capabilities with support for Server Name Indication (SNI).
  • Enhanced Reporting – Includes a new, expanded library of pre-packaged and customizable reports.

For more information about Keyfactor Command 7, please visit: https://blog.keyfactor.com/introducing-new-integrations-and-more-in-keyfactor-7.

For more information about Keyfactor and its services, please visit: www.keyfactor.com.

 

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Securing 5G Through Cyber-Telecom Identity Federation

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 19, 2019 by itnerd

Today, more than ever before, organizations are keen on taking advantage of the speed, automation, and global reach of 5G technology. The challenge is that the majority have little to no direct experience in telecommunication technology.

Trend Micro has released a report, Securing 5G Through Cyber-Telecom Identity Federation highlighting the major gaps in handling identities in IT and Telecommunications along with solutions to better equip businesses as they transition to using new technology to carry out various functions.

The report forces businesses to reconsider their approach to cybersecurity by listing out the security strategies, technical skills, and additional technologies needed to successfully adopt 5G and fully reap its benefits.

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Guest Post: Hisense Tells You How To Check That Gamer Off Your List

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 19, 2019 by itnerd

It’s the time of year to make that list and check it twice.

Of course checking it is the easy part. The real challenge is making the list in the first place. Even if you know what you want to get people, there is always the risk they won’t like it, it’s the wrong size or not the right kind of item. That is particularly true if you have a video gamer in your life, and you would like to get them the right set up so they can fully enjoy their hobby.

“While it is the thought that counts, you are best to do a bit of research to make sure you are getting the right item,” says Travis Thompson, a product training expert with Hisense Canada. “Not just any TV will do for today’s video game consoles. You need a high resolution, stark contrasts and a quick-moving screen to keep up with action without any lag time.”

When shopping for a TV for the gamer on your list, Travis recommends looking for the following:

  • Resolution — 4K is pretty much a given on any new TV nowadays, but all of the modern game consoles are now in 4K resolution. To get the most out of the gaming system, it is best to have a TV that matches what the console supports.
  • HDR — The short form of high-dynamic range, it means the TV has a massive range of colours, which appear brighter and in greater contrast. It is great for dark scenes in games.
  • Low Input Lag — Video games move fast, and if your refresh or motion rate is low the images on the screen will blur. Look for a refresh rate of 120Hz for crisp, clear action the screen at all times.
  • MEMC — A chip (Motion Estimation / Motion Compensation) that is used to interpolate extra images on your TV, which is a fancy way of saying it works with the refresh or motion rate to smooth out the picture.
  • Local Dimming — By automatically dimming the backlight on black parts of the image on the screen, local dimming gives deeper and darker blacks and better contrast and colour accuracy.

“Some TVs are ideally for watching movies, others for sports and some for video games,” says Travis. “The Hisense H8 family of 4K ULED TVs is perfectly suited for that escape into the alternate reality of video games.”

For more information, please visit hisense-canada.com

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