At India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (Jio) unveiled its patent-filed innovation – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Video Call Assistant [Bot] that can be accessed via a 4G phone call, without the need for installing any other application.

The Jio Video Call Assistant has the potential to revolutionize customer support and customer communication use cases.  With this, current customer pain points like endless call-hold music or seemingly never ending IVR wait-times can become things of the past.

The innovative customer engagement video assistant solution has been developed by Jio in conjunction with US based Radisys, a Reliance Industries Ltd subsidiary & a leader in providing open telecom solutions to service providers worldwide.

AI based Jio Video Call Assistant empowers businesses and other users with speedy and effortless resolution of repetitive queries from their customers, making their frontend communication smooth. It also helps brands to offer an efficient and effortless high-quality customer engagement experience.

The Jio video bot uses a powerful AI-based platform to listen to customers’ questions and respond to them in the most appropriate way. In addition, the platform has a unique auto-learning feature that helps improve the answering accuracy.

The Jio Bot Maker, a tool that accompanies the Jio Bot platform, aims to democratise AI by enabling small businesses to create their own AI based Bot with no-coding and with minimal effort. The Video Bot can be highly customized to meet various customer engagement requirements while providing a human like interaction.

The video call bot can be adapted by brands to give it a unique avatar.  The avatar can be the conventional customer care executive, the CEO, the brand ambassador or any other person or character chosen by the brands. This AI based customer care avatar can be invoked by the users by simply dialling a video call enabled helpline. The AI video call bot will come with multilingual capabilities to enable brands communicate with customers in a language of their choice.

Mathew Oommen, President of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, said

Jio is committed to bring innovative and relevant digital solutions to enable and empower businesses to conduct their operations more efficiently and Video Call Assistant is one such example of bringing a truly innovative and engaging product for millions of businesses in India.

Radisys is helping us make AI accessible for everyone, so that businesses – small or large can reap the benefits of new and emerging technologies. Radisys’ innovation continues to help accelerate Jio’s global innovation and technology leadership in the areas of 5G, IOT and open source architecture adoption.

The AI Based Video Call Bot can deliver immense benefits to all businesses – big or small.  Across industries, this solution will help brands, big or small, interact with their customers in a completely disruptive and friendly way.

In keeping with its commitment to empowering everyone to achieve more, Microsoft India, in partnership with Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, will host the second edition of Empower from 14th~17th October at I-TEC, IIT Delhi- Sonipat. This unique conference will bring together leading researchers, technologists and policy makers to discuss actionable steps in creating and making available assistive technologies and highlight the challenges in doing so. Stakeholders from entire ecosystem, Disabled Persons’ Organizations [DPOs] & Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] will also participate in the conference.

Commenting on this, Prof. M. Balakrishnan, Founder of ASSISTECH and Professor, CSE Department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

We believe that integration of differently-abled people should be an important goal for any society and for that providing them equal opportunities in mobility and education is critical. Using assistive echnologies, we can help empower them to be a part of the societal progress.

Through this conference, we aim to address the challenges faced by people with disabilities and bring together all researchers, industries, users and user organizations involved in the creation, production and dissemination of assistive technology solutions.

Speaking on this, Dr. Manohar Swaminathan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research (MSR) said

At Microsoft Research India we have developed AI and ML technologies that can be deployed in low-resource environments. These include Embedded ML libraries which can enable the community of designers to leverage the power of AI and ML to enhance life of people with disabilities in India.

We believe that the conference will provide a fertile ground for innovation by connecting such tools with designers of assistive technologies in confluence with people with disabilities who need such solutions.

Empower focuses on reaching the communities with different abilities to focus on researchers and technologists presenting solutions and ideas to empower them. Over the four days, the conference will feature various sessions including workshops and seminars to discuss the depth and breadth of disability and assistive technologies. The event will also include a keynote session Empowering for Inclusion by Dr. Sriram Rajamani, distinguished scientist and Managing Director, Microsoft Research India on empowering billions with technology and the efforts by Microsoft in leveraging technology for inclusion.

It will also showcase key assistive technology solutions like the spatial audio toolkit for immersive exploration of games and virtual environments. Other key solutions from Microsoft include CodeTalk [developed by MSR] to enhance programmer productivity and GesturePod, an interaction device for people using white-canes, built using powerful Embedded Machine Learning Libraries.   These resources are freely available to developers of assistive technologies.

Microsoft and AI for Accessibility

Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility is a 5 year, $25 million program that harnesses the power of AI to amplify human capability for the more than 1 billion people around the world with a disability. AI is now capable of seeing, hearing, and reasoning with increasing accuracy. Real time speech-to-text transcription, computer vision capabilities, and predictive text functionality are just a few examples of how AI is useful to people with disabilities today. AI for Accessibility aims to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions that build on recent advancements in Microsoft Cognitive Services to help developers create intelligent apps that see, hear, understand and better interpret people’s needs.

Continuing its endeavor to build a secure and trusted cloud ecosystem, Microsoft has rolled the Trusted Cloud Tour. A year-long program designed to help organizations build trust and a comprehensive information security strategy, the Microsoft Trusted Cloud Tour will be a combination of multi-city and virtual sessions that will touch over 150 enterprises across the country. Microsoft also announced the general availability of Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native security information and event management [SIEM] system in India.

Keshav Dhakad, Group Head & Assistant General Counsel, Corporate, External & Legal Affairs [CELA], Microsoft India, said

Cloud-based services and mobile computing have changed the technology landscape for the modern enterprise. As companies embrace the opportunities presented by cloud innovation and mobile computing to enhance customer experiences, increase productivity, and optimize operations, their digital journey accelerates.

With traditional IT boundaries disappearing, building a trusted IT ecosystem takes planning, time and commitment for organizations to get it right. Microsoft is empowering businesses in India to manage this by delivering trust in technology and bringing the right blend of modern cloud technology and expertise, combined with unparalleled built-in privacy, security, compliance and transparency benefits of enterprise grade and at hyper scale.

The Microsoft Trusted Cloud Tour aims to support enterprises to enhance trust in their services and build a cybersecurity strategy in the era of flux and transformation. It will

• give them an insight into the current data governance trends and regulations across the world and in India
• help them manage cloud security intelligently by proactively monitoring, analyzing and prioritizing threats within their environment to counter next-gen attacks
• enable them to leverage technologies such as AI and machine learning for developing security capabilities, as these technologies have the potential to help automate threat detection processes and allow cybersecurity talents to focus on higher-level activities and
• serve as a platform for brainstorming and exchange of ideas for front-line security executives

The tour will culminate in the first annual Microsoft CISO Awards which will recognize best practices across industries at the end of the fiscal year.

Microsoft has also made Azure Sentinel – a cloud-native SIEM that provides intelligent security analytics at cloud scale for enterprises of all sizes and workloads – now generally available. Unveiled in February this year, Azure Sentinel supports open standards such as Common Event Format [CEF] and broad partner connections, including Microsoft Intelligent Security Association partners such as Check Point, Cisco, F5, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Symantec, as well as broader ecosystem partners such as ServiceNow.

It blends the insights of Microsoft experts and AI with the unique insights and skills of in-house defenders of organizations and machine learning tools to uncover the most sophisticated attacks before they take root. Azure Sentinel helps empower SecOps teams to keep their organizations safe by harnessing the power, simplicity and extensibility of Azure to analyze data from Microsoft 365 and security solutions from other vendors.

Early adopters have found that Azure Sentinel reduces threat hunting from hours to seconds. With Azure Sentinel, enterprises can now keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes without adding analyst resources, and reduce hardware and operational costs.

Truecaller today an update to Truecaller Voice, which is now integrated with a call waiting feature that will enable users’ access to interruption-free HD quality calls. The feature is designed to make users aware that there is a second caller whose call is waiting to be answered, without auto-pausing the current call.

This provides users the freedom to either continue with the ongoing VoIP call or switch to the second call based on their choice. The feature is built to operate seamlessly across both phone and VoIP calls. Furthermore, the second caller is also informed about the call waiting status.

Truecaller Voice also extends the platform’s caller ID feature to detect unknown numbers and spammers calling through internet calls. In the case of a second call coming from an unidentified number, the caller ID feature helps in caller identification, thus allowing users to make an informed decision and prioritize choosing between the current and second call in real time. On top of this, Truecaller Voice is available to all iOS users globally.

The final edition of the four-city series of Dell Technologies Forum 2019 in Bengaluru, witnessed an overwhelming horde of technology enthusiasts filling the venue with exhilaration. I was amazed to be a part of this excitement and took a dive into the proliferation of information shared by the tech leaders through different track sessions.

Attending the forum, I was able to explore Dell Technologies’ innovations that are structuring the digital future for different industries. Dell Technologies had also unveiled its updated power portfolio of products and solutions that have been designed to equip people with digital armors; while enabling enterprises redefine their transformation journey. Being at the forefront of technology revolution in India, the company has truly reinterpreted the future of technology.

It was a massive event, where every session had spread different ripples of intelligence. The event started with a keynote session by Amit Midha, President, APJ and Vivek Mehrotra, Director, Enterprise Sales; followed by three tracks full of insightful sessions. What really instigated me was the discourse by Amit Midha, where he spoke about exploring the possibilities of digital future in India. He acclaimed that being one of the fastest growing startup nations, India holds immense opportunities owing to the huge amount of data that is being generated, the accelerating number of data scientists, and the advancements in analytical power.

He also stated that now is the right time for Dell Technologies to empower Indian organizations with next generation infrastructure, security protocols and AI algorithms, and prepare the country to lead the digital drive.

Other messages that were communicated through different sessions were about thriving in the data economy by unlocking the value of data capital, the future of work and workforce, the roadmap to possibilities, the changing scope of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, 5G and many more. One of the sessions had also exhibited Dell Technologies’ brand new portfolio of PCs that is designed for the next-gen workforce. There is no denying that the new products introduced by the company are sure to revamp the way we work. All-in-all, it was an amazing experience to know how innovation is empowering not just different industries, but also the people at large.

Apart from the sessions, there was a hands-on lab zone, where visitors were able to take a closer look at Dell Technologies’ latest products. There was an expert zone to help visitors realize how the tech giant plans to revamp different industries through emerging technologies. And to keep the excitement rolling, the forum also had a social media desk where visitors could partake in interesting social media activities and win interesting goodies.

And, if you want to get a glimpse of all the interesting activities and want to know what’s next, stay connected though Dell EMC Facebook and Twitter handles.

Reinforcing its commitment to help introduce new technologies to academia, Microsoft Garage India has partnered with Indian Institute of Technology [IIT], Roorkee to conduct lectures on quantum computing for a full semester. IIT’s BTech and MTech students can choose the course as a pool elective. The course, which has been structured by IIT Roorkee and Microsoft, will provide the students,  access to Q# Programming Language practical examples, Microsoft Quantum Development Kit and Microsoft Quantum Faculty.

Quantum computing has taken a big leap in drawing attention from the student community with its power to solve intricate challenges in no time. Students today are aware of quantum computing’s ability to run a myriad of conflicting parameters and variables at a pace that is unparalleled. This, however, also begets the need to provide this body of emerging programmers with direct access to quantum programming in course of their education.

Microsoft’s quantum computing program which has been running for more than 15 years, helps students understand the technology, develop practical applications, and build the quantum workforce of the future. Microsoft experts will provide engineers at IIT Roorkee a unique approach to learn quantum computing with real-world experiments and access to tools.

Commenting on the partnership, Reena Dayal, Director, Microsoft Garage India, said

This collaboration between Microsoft Garage and IIT Roorkee represents another step towards empowering students to create futuristic innovations. With Microsoft’s experience in the field of quantum computing, we aim to make the technology more accessible and enhance the learning journey of engineering students. The partnership will create a new learning experience for students and help them build impactful solutions.

Expressing his views on this partnership Prof Ajit K. Chaturvedi – Director IIT Roorkee, said

I look forward for this collaboration between Microsoft Garage and IIT Roorkee, as it is a great opportunity for our institute and students to grow and learn through this quantum computing program. We believe that together we will be able to deliver and achieve our respective goals.

Microsoft aims to enable students across the world to foster innovation and craft solutions for real-time challenges. Our initiatives provide students with practical experience, expert guidance and mentorship which empowers them to achieve more. Microsoft Garage India has been closely working with academia to provide students access to new technologies and encouraging them to innovate aggressively, learn through practice, and build creatively.