2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Red Box Thinks Outside the Box

England-based voice specialist Red Box began the past 12 months by launching Conversa, an open enterprise voice platform that lets users listen to, share, and act on enterprise-wide audio and media data.

Conversa captures audio and rich media from every conversation taking place across the enterprise. Free and open REST APIs ensure real-time access to and control of datasets and support artificial intelligence-ready audio and video, rich metadata, and transcripts for virtually any application.

“With organizations under increased pressure to support distributed workforces, as well as driving differentiation through digital transformation, it’s even more critical than ever for them to retain sovereignty of one of their richest and most powerful datasets: the voice of their customers and employees,” said Richard Stevenson, CEO of Red Box, in a statement. “Conversa empowers organizations to tap into the rich insights within enterprise-wide audio and media while also benefiting from market-leading infrastructure.”

In just a few short months, Conversa caught widespread industry attention, and vendors lined up to integrate it into their own products.

Through a deal struck with Microsoft in December, Red Box Conversa is now available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. That move delivers a capture layer for enterprise voice that combines Conversa audio processing in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AI with seamless support of both cloud and premises-based telephony.

Red Box had already partnered with Microsoft to release Compliance Recording for Microsoft Teams, providing capture, retrieval, archiving, and retention of Microsoft Teams communications.

“With the integration between Red Box, Teams, and Dynamics 365, organizations can benefit from resilient capture that addresses regulatory requirements, while also securing access to high-quality audio and metadata for AI and analytics purposes,” said Jun Pak, product marketing manager, Modern Work Teams and Platform, at Microsoft, in a statement at the time.

Other Conversa partnerships forged in late 2020 and early 2021 included an alliance with Medallia for an integration that provides real-time analysis of audio and media datasets captured by Red Box Conversa and transcribed by Medallia Experience Cloud.

A similar partnership that Red Box inked with Behavox brings audio conversations into the Behavox platform through Red Box Conversa, enabling delivery of detailed, actionable analytics for leading financial firms to address issues of fraud. Pairing Behavox’s and Red Box’s solutions will also provide access to an ecosystem of AI voice technology capabilities.

“Red Box’s ability to support voice capture from any platform and the open-API philosophy will support built-in data integrity and data reconciliation mechanisms, enabling us to help customers catch compliance violations quickly and accurately,” said Kiryl Trembovolski, chief operating officer of Behavox, in a statement.

Through a partnership with Deepgram, Conversa provides the real-time audio capture, and Deepgram, with deep learning and customizable speech recognition capabilities, transforms this real-time audio stream into transcripts for companies to leverage in artificial intelligence, analytics, and compliance solutions.

“Red Box provides a high-quality, stereo audio feed that, combined with Deepgram’s cutting-edge model training and data labeling, provides fast, scalable, enterprise-grade speech recognition and understanding,” said Shadi Baqleh, chief operating officer at Deepgram, in a statement.

ID R&D, a provider of voice and facial biometrics, also integrated Conversa into its voice biometrics platform, allowing customers to use their natural conversational voices as an authentication method in the contact center.

With Conversa, ID R&D’s voice biometric requires less than a second to create a voice template and compare it to the voice template on file. The integrated solution can also be deployed within an interactive voice response system to facilitate self-service and further reduce agent talk time. Additionally, with more call center agents working remotely, the solution can be used to authenticate agent identities.

“Using biometrics in the contact center has been complex and expensive,” said John Amein, senior vice president of ID R&D, in a statement. “Together with Red Box, we are lowering barriers to adoption so that more companies can benefit from state-of-the-art biometric security and improved customer experience.”

The year also saw an integration with RingCentral, a provider of global enterprise cloud communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions.

The partnership will ensure delivery of real-time recorded audio and video conversations captured from the RingCentral platform for organizations in highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare.