www.managedITmag.co.uk 27 CLOUD TELEPHONY that many businesses pay lip service to the technology. NFON, however, is clearly putting its money where its mouth is, giving customers and partners the opportunity to transform efficiency and significantly enhance the customer experience. www.nfon.com Portugal. This will give it access to the region’s growing pool of highly qualified IT and software development talent. By the end of 2025, NFON expects to have recruited 30 new employees for its Pristina office to work across its R&D, Finance and HR functions. Such is the buzz around AI partner community, the source of 99.9% of its business. In addition, NFON has announced the opening of a new office in Pristina in the Republic of Kosovo, on top of existing facilities in Germany (Munich, Mainz, Mannheim and Berlin), the UK, Austria, Italy and The right building blocks ManagedIT learns more about NFON’s AI plans from its Head of AI Core, Tim Hendriks Tim Hendriks, Head of the AI core team at NFON AG, is part of the company’s recently formed AI & Innovation organisation, set up last year to bring together and integrate the voice-centric parts of NFON with its growing AI capabilities. The new department incorporates NFON’s previous AI Competence Centre, giving NFON additional resource and capacity to enhance its own products with AI and create bespoke solutions for partners and end user customers. The AI & Innovation organisation already includes six or seven teams, each with up to seven members, covering distinct areas, from Hendriks’ AI Core team, which focuses on the implementation of large language models (LLMs), to UX and UI teams concentrating on end user engagement. In addition to its own capabilities, the AI & Innovation organisation is able to draw on AI skills and workflow automation tools gained through NFON’s acquisition of botari, a developer of voicebots and chatbots linking LLMs and corporate data sources. Fruitful collaboration The first product of this collaboration is the generative AI chatbot Nia, powered by botari, now deployed on NFON’s website, partner portal and internally. This provides users with quick, condensed answers to written questions about NFON and its products, freeing users from having to source the information themselves. “The obvious way to use Nia is as an alternative to documentation,” explains Hendriks. “Why navigate your way through the website to the technical documentation section, select the product you want to know something about and then the specific aspect you’re interested in, for example Call Forwarding, when you can ask Nia and get an answer in seconds? Already, with Nia version one, people recognise that it saves time, because instead of clicking five or six times, they just have to type one message and press enter.” For transparency and reassurance, NFON provides links to the source of any information, from static technical manuals to ever changing real-time data sources such as status updates for the Cloudya telephony platform. “We always want to tell the user where each piece of information is coming from, so that they can confirm that it’s not an hallucination. They can click on the link provided and verify that the answer matches the source from which the bot has taken the information,” explains Hendriks. He adds that this capability also allows Nia to be used as a sophisticated form of search: “It gives you a condensed answer to your specific need and points you to a link that you can click to read, in full detail, what you might want to know.” Hendriks says that Nia and the rolling introduction of AI-powered enhancements to NFON’s telephony products, starting with the transcription (and emailing) of voice mail messages, are obvious first applications of AI technology that, as well as providing a practical benefit for customers, are a good advertisement for botario’s capabilities. Future developments, he suggests, will be influenced to an extent by user comments and requests submitted via Nia’s feedback button. “My team is really happy we now have Nia out there because, with this feedback button, our hope is that before we invest a lot of resources into cool, new features, we can see how people are using Nia and let their feedback dictate what we choose to do next,” he says. Building blocks In this context, Hendriks points out that the real magic of botario lies in the ease with which workflows can be created for internal purposes and for partnergenerated projects. “As developers, we can do a lot through scripting – all you need is proficiency in Python coding. But the goal of botario is also to have ready-to-use building blocks that let you build your flow with a low code, no code approach. The more projects we do in collaboration with the botario team, the more knowledge continued... Photo: pixabay.com/VetVisst
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