Salesforce intros Einstein Voice, an AI voice assistant for enterprises
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Salesforce has released details about a forthcoming AI capability from its Einstein artificial intelligence platform that aims to meld conversational voice assistants with enterprise sales workflows. With Einstein Voice, users will be able to verbally talk to the Salesforce platform to perform a range of administrative tasks, such as note dictation and data entry.
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As with all Salesforce products, Einstein Voice is specifically tailored to busy salespeople, and increasingly those who are mobile. Using natural language processing, voice recognition technology and other Einstein AI tidbits, Einstein Voice can translate voice memos into unstructured voice data, which is then used to update Salesforce records, notify team members and create tasks.
The assistant also lets users surface data from within Salesforce using only voice commands, and will compile tailored readouts of key Salesforce metrics into a daily briefing on a smart speaker. The Einstein Voice Assistant can also be configured to understand jargon that is unique to a company's lexicon.
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Meantime, Salesforce Einstein Voice Bots, another component of the Voice platform, lets companies build their own customer-facing voice bots for answering customer service questions on a smart speaker.
"We're in the midst of an incredible technological shift, where the power of voice is fundamentally changing the way we work," said Parker Harris, co-founder and CTO of Salesforce. "Einstein Voice will usher in a new era of conversational CRM, delivering new levels of productivity and redefining customer experiences with voice technology."
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The launch of Einstein Voice comes a day after Salesforce introduced Quip Slides, a tool that aims to make internal slide decks a bit more functional. In terms of Einstein, Salesforce recently brought more AI features into its Sales Cloud platform, and in July made Einstein bots for businesses generally available.
Both the voice assistant and bot tools are launching in private pilot as part of Salesforce's winter and summer 2019 releases. Salesforce is hosting its annual Dreamforce customer conference next week, where it's expected to make a bevy of additional announcements and shed more light on when Einstein Voice will become generally available.
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