What are the Challenges Faced by Enterprises While Employing Voice

The issues still impacting the voice services are interconnectivity, robocalling, and teleconference audio quality. New technologies are coming up that can eradicate the issues, but they are still in a nascent stage. 

FREMONT, CA: In the world of electronic communications, nothing is familiar to a phone call. It may seem that with the progress of technology, everything has changed, but there are many issues from the last millennium that persists in the voice services, along with new challenges with the latest technologies. 

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Although a solution to the problems would be fantastic, the problem is that some of the concerns will remain with voice services for some time to come. The issues do not reflect any lack of technology but rather elements of human nature and interpersonal relationships.

Below are three problems that persist in voice services and the actions that are being taken to address them.

 1. Robocalling

Robocalling is the most common and oldest type of spam that has continuously impacted voice services. The development of voice bots has helped the spam calls to reach a new level. Earlier, there used to be limited spam calls as the operators could only make one call at a time. But, now, the automated call centers can manage thousands of requests per minute.

There can be two solutions to spam calls. First, regulatory initiatives can be taken by the countries, and they can enforce legal penalties to prevent the robocallers and also stiffer penalties for the robocaller schemes that include personal data. Second, technology companies can back this by introducing an intelligent answering machine that will answer an incoming call instead of the user. And if the algorithm recognizes the call as "spam," the robot will hang up. 

This is an exciting solution but requires intensive resources. When operators try to include such intelligent assistants to their lines, the network will deteriorate as the entire infrastructure will have to analyze billions of calls almost regularly.

The malicious robocallers will not sit idle and start new forms of bypassing various blockages, and the callers will continue until they see a return on their investment. That is the main reason why phone spam is not possible to completely eradicate.

 2. Interconnectivity Issues

There are many telecom operators in the world, and each of them has their infrastructure that works well as long as they stay in the network. If a person makes a call in the same infrastructure, the call that comes through is of high quality and without any distortion. However, when someone calls from a cloud-based contact center outside the network, the call tends to flow through the telephone network and producing a lower quality recording. The reverse process happens too. Hence, both the caller as well as the call center employee (a person or bot) gets to hear lower-quality audio.

This is a global problem, and it can be solved by creating an informal network. In this case, the internet serves its original purpose, which is connecting different networks into a single global system. The problem starts when voices start moving from one network to another. The implementation of 5G can be considered as a part of the solution. 5G will permit the maximum number of users to apply for various VoIP-solutions, therefore, avoiding the conventional telephone networks.

Even with 5G, some issues remain in terms of voice services as after the implementation stage, all the operators will not be covered, while still pursuing the interconnect problem. In contrast to telephone spam, the chance of improvement in voice quality can change with time. 

3. Teleconference Audio Quality

The third problem, which is mainly what the business users have to deal with, is the mediocre quality of sound during a teleconference. The traditional answer to the problem is the sound preparation of the room as it helps in minimizing the reflection of sound waves from the walls. Thus reducing the penetration of sounds from any external sources, and determines a proper arrangement of the speakers and microphones based on the number of participants in the call. The decision is most suitable for large companies as every company cannot afford it. 

Another suitable method is the usage of artificial intelligence (AI), as it processes the outbound signal in real-time, eliminating unnecessary noises and emphasizing on the voice. Eradicating voices can be a real computational challenge, as sounds are different and can change regularly. There is already some AI application in the market that can be used for voice cancellation, but still, the method has not been recognized universally. The demand for the system can increase in the future depending upon how it performs in recent times. 

However, many changes are required to perfect other technologies, such as live voice translation. Technicians are actively working on it, but presently the systems are still at an early stage, and active modifications are being made on them. Voice translation can be a challenging task as it contains a lot of nuances, so if a translator loses them while translating, then the meaning of the sentence will change entirely.   

To recap, here are where things stand for voice services and their issues:

Mass spam calls made with the help of bots- Regulators and technology companies might address spam calls, but robocalling will continue to persist in the future. 

Quality of transmitted signal at interconnect- The solution appears to be a mass implementation of 5G and global usage of VoIP. However, it is not possible to achieve this at once. 

Poor quality of communication during teleconferences- The problem is being solved slowly and steadily by improving AI that can process the signal in real-time.

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