As a leading provider of business, collaboration, and productivity applications mainly targeted for small businesses, Zoho has staked its claim in helping move businesses to the cloud. The company started some 22 years ago and built an impressive roster of business applications — including sales, marketing, customer support, collaboration, finance, HR, IT, and many more — tallying more than 40 million users globally.

In the growing trend of enterprises bringing Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and conversational resources to support better customer experiences and enhanced employee productivity, Zoho has integrated conversational AI capabilities into its suite of products with “Zia,” an intelligence-enabled assistant and analytics engine.

Last November, the company outlined how Zia helps customer support agents drive meaningful conversations with sentiment predictions, analyzing and autotagging words in a support ticket in order to route to the appropriate agent. According to Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna, all Zia technology is developed internally with enhancements to train the NLP engine and connect to a host of Zoho applications and/or third-party integrations.

“Zia Voice,” first introduced in February 2018, also supports natural language and voice interactions so businesses can program AI-enabled conversation assistants to service customers. Zoho previously unveiled Zia Voice for sales teams to add speech and chat capabilities, as well as predicting deal closures. In the same vein, SalesForce introduced Einstein Voice at last year’s Dreamforce to help field reps transcribe conversations, create tasks using natural language, and navigate analytics dashboards.

At last week’s “ZohoDay” at the company’s headquarters in Pleasanton, CA, CEO Sridhar Vembu spoke eloquently about the company’s success and movement up market. And as Zia is increasingly threaded into the company’s suite of CRM and Customer Experience platform applications, it’s clear that NLP and conversational technologies are fundamentally changing the workplace for enterprises and small businesses alike.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles, Mobile + Location