Speech Processing Solutions announced the latest innovation to their web-based dictation and transcription solution, Philips SpeechLive. With the new desktop app for Windows, users can now dictate directly into any third-party applications including productivity applications Microsoft Word, Outlook or CRM software, to meet the increasing demand for efficient voice recognition and document creation processes within organizations. The new SpeechLive desktop app allows for a more user-friendly and convenient speech-to-text workflow, which saves the customer more time and avoids unnecessary errors which can be made by copying and pasting pieces of text from a different window. Philips SpeechLive now also comes with a new dedicated mobile app, which allows users to be productive on the go. The app rounds up the company’s software portfolio, allowing SpeechLive customers to turn their voice into text from anywhere, anytime.
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 13 of 95)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
Asana, Inc. announced a suite of features to eliminate distributed work distractions and help employees find their focus. The new productivity offerings enable people to reduce meetings with Video Messaging, prioritize their work with intelligent My Tasks, create time for focus with Clockwise’s smart calendar assistant, and quiet notifications with the Asana desktop app.
Video Messaging: In partnership with Vimeo, a video platform, Asana now offers Video Messaging, giving teams the ability to record short videos of themselves and/or their screen directly in Asana, and show work to teammates. Automated video transcripts become an accountable part of the plan of record housed in Asana’s Work Graph data model.
My Tasks: With the personal prioritization system, customers can now organize their work in Kanban, list, and calendar versions of their tasks.
Smart Calendar Assistant Integration: By entering the amount of time needed and when you want to work, Clockwise will automatically reserve time on your calendar to complete the task. Once scheduled, customers will see the task calendar event in their Google Calendar.
Asana Desktop App: Available on Mac and Windows, Asana’s desktop app has been purpose-built to block out noise and help focus.
SocialChorus and Dynamic Signal, two high-growth SaaS companies in the digital employee experience (DEX) space, announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement. Sumeru Equity Partners (SEP) will make a significant new growth investment in SocialChorus and subsequently fund the combination with Dynamic Signal. In addition, senior management and existing investors of both companies will invest a meaningful stake into the transaction.
SocialChorus and Dynamic Signal are on a mission to transform how companies connect every worker with the right information at the right time. This combination will accelerate the move away from destination site delivery models to an orchestrated digital employee experience that fosters employee productivity and well-being.
SocialChorus and Dynamic Signal will unite under Gary Nakamura, CEO of SocialChorus, and an executive team comprised of Dynamic Signal and SocialChorus team members. Three representatives from the Dynamic Signal board of directors, including Eric Brown, CEO of Dynamic Signal, will join the current SocialChorus board of directors to form the board of the combined company.
FileCloud 21.1, the latest version of the company’s cloud-agnostic enterprise file sync, sharing and data governance platform, places speed and security at the heart of its new update. FileCloud 21.1 is significantly faster than the previous version, with increased efficiency and the ability to handle higher loads. The system software applications have been upgraded for optimal performance on Apache, PHP, MongoDB and SOLR. The customer experience has also been enhanced, with a new, streamlined user interface along with the debut of a log-in wizard that makes setting up and changing the Drive configuration easy.
- Accessibility improvements mean that FileCloud is now compliant with VPAT Guideline 2.1, which requires that all functionality be available from the keyboard.
- Seamless integration with Microsoft Office allows users to take advantage of sensitivity labels that users can apply to files. These labels, which travel with the data in FileCloud, ensure security and compliance wherever the file travels.
- Admins are now tied to roles to make it easier to assign permissions. This gives more control when allowing access to the admin portal.
- FileCloud Drive will take advantage of Apple’s latest operating system, macOS Big Sur, running Apple silicon.
Kofax, a supplier of Intelligent Automation software for digital workflow transformation, announced the latest release of its Intelligent Automation Platform. Kofax TotalAgility, the workflow orchestration engine within the company’s Intelligent Automation Platform, has been enhanced with 50 new low-code, document intelligence, process orchestration and connected systems capabilities.
- Faster development of automation workflows. A new user experience extends low-code to more business users by empowering citizen developers and analysts to easily setup complex workflows. An enhanced business rules engine allows analysts to execute decision strategies by using visual condition rules and setting up custom services without needing to code.
- Expanded low-code support for cognitive capture. Nearly 90 percent of data generated today is unstructured. Kofax’s cognitive capture functionality enables professional developers to build advanced AI and Capture models, allowing them to train the system and effectively incorporate document intelligence.
- One-click document classification. Kofax TotalAgility enables citizen developers and business analysts to enhance advanced document classification models, empowering them to rapidly and visually train, identify and classify documents.
- Additional low-code integration options. Simplified integrations include new support for OpenAPI and grouping of data, enabling data models to be defined manually or using simple JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Enhanced support for industry-standard OAuth 2.0 provides greater authorization and authentication options.
https://www.kofax.com/products/totalagility/release-highlights
Studio Network Solutions (SNS), provider of workflow storage servers for professional media teams, announced that their easy-to-use ShareBrowser media asset management (MAM) software is now available as a workflow integration plugin for DaVinci Resolve Studio video editing software by Blackmagic Design. The new workflow integration provides access to the ShareBrowser MAM system from directly inside of DaVinci Resolve, allowing video editors to search, tag, preview, comment, and import media without leaving the Resolve video editing workspace. The ShareBrowser workflow integration plugin for Resolve is available to EVO users working in DaVinci Resolve Studio 17 or later. Both ShareBrowser and its integrated DaVinci Resolve plugin come included with EVO video editing servers at no additional cost.
Asana announced Universal Reporting, offering new ways for leaders to keep track of how work is progressing towards business critical goals. Powered by Asana’s Work Graph data model, Universal Reporting provides complete, fully-connected, accurate reports with real-time information on team activities, workloads, and budget.
Rather than relying on endless check-in meetings and outdated status updates, Universal Reporting enables real-time clarity across any combination of projects. In just a few clicks, a manager can pull together a unique set of projects across multiple departments to showcase progress in a way that’s customizable, flexible and always up-to-date.
- Get real-time information without manual effort: Because Dashboards are connected to the work in Asana the information is up-to-date.
- Unblock work with meaningful and actionable insights: Asana’s charts make it easy to quickly diagnose potential issues, navigate to the underlying data and take action on it.
- Streamline reporting with a single source of truth: When an organization’s work lives in Asana, reporting becomes straightforward and streamlined. Once the reporting direction is set, teams have the flexibility to create charts on any workstream they need to monitor.
Lots of news this week at the annual Microsoft Build developer conference. They did produce a very helpful “Book of News” (at about 8,800 words) with a table of contents to cover it all. Below is a selection of announcements our readers are most likely to be interested in, followed by a link to the complete list.
Azure AI
Azure Cognitive Services, a family of AI services to deploy high-quality models as APIs, has multiple updates, including:
- Document Translation, a feature of Translator in Azure Cognitive Services announced in preview in February, is now generally available. Document Translation enables developers to quickly translate documents while preserving the structure and format of the original document. This feature helps enterprises and translation agencies that require the translation of complex documents into one or more languages.
- Text Analytics for health is now generally available with Text Analytics in Azure Cognitive Services. It enables developers to process and extract insights from unstructured medical data. Unstructured text includes doctors’ notes, medical journals, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols and more. Another new feature of Text Analytics is Question Answering. Now in preview, Question Answering helps users find answers from a passage of text without saving or managing any data in Azure.
Azure Data
With the introduction of the partial document update for Azure Cosmos DB, developers can modify specific fields or properties within a document without requiring a full document read and replace. This gives developers more flexibility to update only certain portions. Partial document update is available for Core (SQL) API and via .NET SDK, Java SDK and stored procedures. Developers can sign up for the partial document update preview.
Azure Cosmos DB serverless is now generally available for all APIs (Core, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table). Developers can now optimize costs and more easily run apps with spiky traffic patterns on Azure Cosmos DB. Serverless is a cost-effective pricing model that charges only for the resources consumed by database operations. It is ideally suited for apps with moderate performance requirements and frequent periods with little to no traffic.
Microsoft 365
Microsoft Graph data connect is now offered on Microsoft Azure as a metered service. Microsoft Graph data connect is a more secure, high-throughput connector designed to copy select Microsoft 365 productivity datasets into the Azure tenant. It’s a tool for developers and data scientists creating organizational analytics or training AI and machine learning models. Although most Microsoft 365 products are offered on a per-user/per-month basis, the company is offering Microsoft Graph data connect as a metered service, so developers pay for only the data they consume.
Microsoft Search Federation, which connects information from across platforms, will be generally available later this year. It creates a unified search experience across Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search and Dynamics 365. Microsoft 365 customers use several search options, from Microsoft Search to Azure Cognitive Search. Microsoft Search Federation connects these systems, making finding information much simpler.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams apps for meetings, launched last year, gives developers the tools to build collaborative apps that help connect people to solve common goals and design experiences across the full lifecycle of a meeting. Now, developers can build even more unique scenarios with new features that include:
- Shared stage integration, in preview, provides developers with new access to the main stage in a Teams meeting through a simple configuration in their app manifest. This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multiuser collaboration experiences for their meetings apps, such as whiteboarding, design, project boards and more.
- New meeting event APIs, in preview, enable the automation of meeting-related workflows through events, such as meeting start and end, with many more planned for later this year.
- Together mode extensibility, coming soon, empowers developers to create custom scenes for Teams meetings and share them with users. This provides an easy design experience, within the Developer portal, so developers can make meetings more engaging.
- Media APIs and resource-specific consent, coming soon, provide developers with real-time access to audio and video streams for transcription, translation, note-taking, insights gathering and more.
Fluid components in Microsoft Teams chat is now in private preview and will expand to more customers in the coming months. Fluid components are powered by the web, can be edited in real-time or asynchronously and work across surfaces, such as Teams and Office apps. Fluid components in Teams chat allow users to send a message with a table, action items or a list that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line, minimizing the need for long chat threads and meetings. Fluid components can be copied and pasted across Teams chats, helping users become more efficient.
Power Platform
Microsoft Power Fx, a low-code open-source programming language, is adding new features that allow developers to build apps using natural language — no coding required.
The new experience centers around three key scenarios: natural language transforms to Power Fx code, Power Fx code transforms to natural language and programming by example where a user inputs an example of a data pattern that trains the model.
This experience is powered by GPT-3, the world’s largest natural language model from OpenAI, running on Azure Machine Learning. Microsoft also is announcing the PROgram Synthesis using Examples SDK (PROSE), which can train models to do certain tasks by typing in a few examples.
Microsoft Power BI users can now embed Microsoft Power BI analytics reports in a Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook, an open-source development tool featuring documents with live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text, is often used for data visualization and more. Power BI Embedded Analytics enables data app developers to engage directly with data, explore analytics and generate reports. These Jupyter Notebook integrations are now in preview.
Power BI Premium, which enables analysts, developers and business users to create, develop and turn data into insights, has added Automation APIs to its deployment pipeline capabilities. This allows developers to use tools, such as Microsoft Azure DevOps and Azure Pipeline, to automate the deployment of Power BI assets and integrate into their existing app deployment framework.
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