Latest Tech News This Week: 8×8 Ups Security, Zoom Taps AI Transcription Tool & More
In the week of April 13, we see video conferencing companies getting serious about privacy, Ribbon Communications rolls out new features to improve Teams voice calling capabilities, and AI transcription software finds a market.
Here Are This Week’s Top Stories:
- 8X8 Bakes E2E Encryption in Video MeetingsPro
- Otter.ai Now on Zoom, Takes the Pain Out of Note-Keeping
- Count on Ribbon to Improve Video Calling Experience on Microsoft Teams
- The World’s Working on Microsoft Teams
Here Are This Week’s Top Stories:
Meeting Software
8X8 Bakes E2E Encryption in Video MeetingsPro
Zoom’s security and privacy woes have served a sharp wake-up call to leading cloud collaboration providers that are suddenly becoming privacy-first. Last week, it was Google and Microsoft that rolled out new features to secure remote meetings. Now 8×8, a leading integrated cloud communications platform has found a new push for privacy — the California-headquartered company launched 8×8 Video MeetingsPro, powered by Jitsi, an open source community that bakes end-to-end encryption, thereby protecting all data on the network. In addition, the Jitsi.org and 8×8 video meetings solutions will be hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which offers better security safeguards, comprehensive security features, and a secure architecture that’s better suited for workloads like video meetings. Interestingly, Jitsi was acquired by 8×8 in 2018, moving out of Atlassian’s stable and has been powering 8×8’s video technology with encryption and advanced security capabilities. Meanwhile, Zoom that earned a rap for lax security and user configurations, has now committed to a 90-day freeze on fixing identity and security issues, hired Facebook’s security exec Alex Stamos and is open to third-party security review.
Otter.ai Now on Zoom, Takes the Pain Out of Note-Keeping
Before the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, I believe AI transcription software was more like a solution looking for a problem. Things have changed significantly with the market booming for speech-to-text solutions that’s otherwise dominated by the Big Four — Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Additionally, AI transcription has not always been on the best levels and requires human intervention, as evidenced by Amazon using humans in the loop to annotate Alexa’s recordings to better the algorithm. Otter.ai, backed by DOCOMO ventures emphasizes its technology differs from voice assistants. This week, Simon Lau, VP of Product at Otter.ai announced Otter Live Video Meeting Notes is available on Zoom meetings, allowing hosts and participants to get live transcription and collaborative note-taking. Another key benefit Lau lays down, “Meeting participants can open the live interactive transcript directly from Zoom and read at their own pace.” With meetings becoming virtual, real-time automated transcriptions can help frontline workers across healthcare, e-commerce, first responders, remote contact center agents to capture information accurately and work efficiently.
Unified Communications as a Service
Count on Ribbon to Improve Video Calling Experience on Microsoft Teams
If you dig deeper into the Unified Communications and Collaboration tech stack, you can uncover a technology that bags far less mainstream attention vis-à-vis encryption, now the tech du jour, thanks in part to Zoom’s bad security practices. We’re talking about Session Border Controller (SBC), the underpinning tech — that monitors and manages network performance, end-to-end session control, and the “border control” function, crucial for warding off intrusions like DOS attacks on UC platforms.
Microsoft Teams, now a resurgent UCC player, notching headline-grabbing meeting minutes and DAUs each day relies on Ribbon Communications, a global name in real time communications software and network solutions space for Direct Routing of Teams – “a service that connects Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and endpoints to voice calling in Microsoft Teams to integrate voice services and enhance security.” In a nutshell, Ribbon SBCs deliver the scalability required to provide cost-effective SIP trunking solutions to Microsoft Teams users.
The company has now rolled out a slew of enhancements to Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe) Lite version 8.1 to improve voice-calling capabilities. Tony Scarfo, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cloud and Edge Business Unit at Ribbon says that as enterprises migrate to Microsoft Teams platform, Ribbon’s Microsoft-certified SBC SWe Lite provides them with a cost-effective, easy to install, easy to use solution for secure IP-based voice services.
Team Collaboration
The World’s Working on Microsoft Teams
As rival Zoom draws criticism from all quarters, Microsoft Teams is hitting new highs, well every day. Teams touted impressive DAUs and remote work trends in its latest report, indicating how video provides a human connection.
Here’re some interesting stats from the report:
- Total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March 4.
- Set a daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, clocking a 200% increase from 900 million on March 16.
- Working from home led people to use video 2X more than before the coronavirus outbreak.
While Microsoft Teams may have been helped along by the coronavirus outbreak, a 2018 Spiceworks survey indicated the growing adoption of Microsoft Teams is influenced by the fact that it’s available at no additional cost to Office 365 users. Additionally, Spiceworks forecasted that among business chat apps, adoption of Microsoft Teams will experience the most growth with 41% organizations using Teams by the end of 2020. Backed by layers of security protection, manageability, cost-effectiveness, and a rich and user-friendly experience, IT support teams find Teams easy to provision.
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