Unified Communications Featured Article

RingCentral Launches AI, Chatbots, Workflow Integrations

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

APIs, ecosystems, and open solutions are all prevalent trends in communications and networking today. And cloud-based business communications solution provider RingCentral (News - Alert) is emphasizing that its strategy aligns with such thinking.

That’s important because in a modern multicloud world, choosing a vendor with an open network philosphy should be critical to any buying decision, says David Lee (News - Alert), vice president of platform products at RingCentral. Open solutions help customers futureproof their investments and prevent them from being locked into specific software services, he adds.

RingCentral’s open platform has been in the market for nearly three years. In that time, the company has attracted 7,500 developers to its community. And there are now 120 applications available in the RingCentral App Gallery.

And the company recently unveiled several new integrations relating to artificial intelligence, chatbots, and workflow.

On the AI front, RingCentral has new integrations with Alexa Skills and Gong.io. RingCentral for Alexa Skills, which should be available by the end of the year, enables people to use their voice to request that the system reads text messages and voicemail. Meanwhile, Gong.io can tell RingCentral users what topics were discussed during a call and other content so businesses can identify and replicate practices used by successful agents and sales people. 

RingCentral believes chatbots are the future of communications, says Lee, adding that’s why the company bought Glip. The company continues to expand its efforts on that front through new Kore.AI and Salesforce Alert Bot integrations. Kore.AI has integrated Asana, Trello, Twitter (News - Alert), and Salesforce bots with RingCentral’s Glip platform. And early next year, RingCentral says Salesforce Alert Bot in Glip will be available. That will allow sales managers to get updates on opportunities within the RingCentral/Glip platform, rather than having to launch Salesforce to get such information.

Ease of use, improved productivity, and meeting customers where they are is also the focus of some of RingCentral’s new integrations on the workflow front. For example, last week the company announced RingCentral for Gmail. The company also has a new integration with Slack that allows users of that popular team collaboration application to use standard slash commands to access RingCentral, “Call” to start a RingCentral audio conference, and “Meet” to start a RingCentral video meeting. Of course, Slack is a competitor to RingCentral’s Glip, but Lee says this integration is just further proof of the unified communications-as-a-service provider’s open nature.