Today’s guest speaker is a leader in speech recognition for voice systems. Listen in as Dan O’Connell of Dialpad, and I discuss about why voice is the new input for all our devices, how real-time speech recognition at Dialpad improves conversations and what organizations can do to build cultures for the modern worker. This is HumAIn.

David Yakobovitch

Welcome to HumAIn. My name is David Yakobovitch and I will be your host throughout this series, together we will explore AI through fireside conversations with industry experts, the business executives and AI researchers to leaders who advance AI for all, HumAIn is the channel to release new AI products to learn about industry trends and to bridge the gap between humans and machines in the fourth industrial revolution. If you like this episode, remember to subscribe. And leave a review.

Welcome back everyone to the HumAIn Podcast. My name’s David Yakobovitch and on today’s episode, our guest speaker is Dan O’Connell. Dan is the chief strategy officer for Dialpad, and also is a member of the board. He previously was also the CEO of a real-time speech analytics and natural language processing startup TalkIQ, which Dialpad acquired about a year ago. He has held leadership positions at Google and AdRoll. Dan, thanks for being with us on the podcast.   

Dan O´Connell

Great. Thanks for having me, David. Appreciate it. 

David Yakobovitch

Dan. It’s amazing how the entire AI space is evolving so fast. A couple of years ago, we weren’t sure if conversational AI was going to be a thing. And now it’s being integrated in products everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Dialpad and its software. I’ve been using the product for a few years and I was one of the beta users to use Dialpad voice intelligence. And now it’s everywhere. Tell us a little bit about how AI is integrated into Dialpad. 

Dan O´Connell

So it’s been, as you mentioned, it’s pretty awesome to see just how prevalent some of these technologies are. As you mentioned at TalkIQ where we’re building a real speech recognition engine, which allows us to do real-time transcription. And then we have to do all of our own NLP, which is a fancy way of saying we can actually take those conversations, transcribe them and help you understand them. So identify sentiment or identify topics.

And so all of those technologies. Since the acquisition a year ago are now baked in across the four Dialpad products. So we have that cloud telephony product. We have a call center product. We have a product that we just launched last week specific to sales teams called Dialpad cell. And then we have UberConference. So we take speech recognition and LP. We make it essentially into the phone line. 

David Yakobovitch

Launching products in the summer. I know we’re recording this episode in June, 2019, so it’s cool and a new product Dialpad sells is out. I’ve worked with organizations where I’m involved with pre-sales and doing some of those components. And there’s so many customers, it’s a lot to manage. What’s unique about Dialpad sell? 

Dan O´Connell

So Dialpad sell is designed specifically for sales organizations. And so anytime I talk to my friends and they ask me about a product to try to talk about in those simple terms possible. And so it’s a really easy way for sales organizations to make high volume calls, and then also understand what’s happening in those calls.

And you essentially have a sales dialer. And it also gives you a business line on your personal device. You have a business phone number it’s fully textable, fully integrated with a systemized record. So things like Salesforce and Zendesk and 365, and then it helps you understand all of what’s happening within those conversations. And that’s really the TalkIQ technology at work, which is you might get asked a question. We can present a suggested answer to that question. We can trap sentiments and purchase intent, and you basically have a Google archive for your conversation. So you can go back and listen to the conversations at hand, you can identify topics and do data mining and really just drive efficiency across your sales organization.

David Yakobovitch

Now, every type of organization could be a sales organization and something on my mind is that we’re in 2019 and there’s over 20 candidates and the democratic party applying for election. And what’s interesting is every candidate builds a whole sales organization. And, we think back to the 2012 and 2016 elections, Twilio softwares was very prevailing, but very few software had AI and live transcribing those conversations to see what’s going well. And what’s not going well. Any thoughts on how this may impact the 2020 election?

Dan O´Connell

Good question. Had not thought about that. What’s interesting. So I guess the way I would take it, what’s interesting in doing this and we do sometimes actually get calls from political parties. It’s mainly to help them understand and drive efficiency just for donations. So as they actually make calls, people want to know what are the candidates that people meant then mentioned if I’m calling you trying to ask for a donation for a specific candidate and you say, no, not going to do it, here’s who I’m actually supporting or here’s who I’m supporting. 

And these are actually the issues that are most pertinent to me, or I care the most about now you can use these technologies to actually quantify that data. So I don’t know if it necessarily influences the outcome, obviously, but the smartest campaigns are going to be leveraging these technologies to quantify some of the topics and quantify obviously the conversations at hand.

And that’s where we obviously think is kind of the biggest opportunity is, the telephone is now cool again and cool again, because you’ve got some not new technologies, but speech recognition and natural language processing now help you understand what’s happening in those conversations and really unique ways that are going to allow you to drive better decision-making. Really, in whatever it is you might be doing. 

David Yakobovitch

Business communications are now very hot again on a recent episode of the HumAIn Podcast. I feature in the well last show retai who runs the AI integration of Alexa and Cortana, and a lot of these natural language processing devices from all the companies.

And really, her mission is building a unified system and voice is the new input for all our devices. I wonder how people are going to continue to interact on the web and for Dialpad, that your product is web focused application focused, many different ways, the products out there, do you see Dialpad coming onto Alexa and OK Google and Apple HomePod. 

Dan O´Connell

What’s interesting is there’s obviously a lot of cases when you kind of look at the big four. So Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. I view them today when we talk about voice is really focused on consumer devices, as you just highlighted. And really that’s where we had started TalkIQ is how do we actually help businesses understand those conversations?

And that presented a really unique opportunity when you also form a technical aspect. So, Telepany audio is at eight Killer Hertz. And so there was also not a lot of focus around how do you actually transcribe accurately a killer Hertz audio, which is basically compressed down and presents its own challenges.

And so when we think about Dialpad, it was look, there was an opportunity to help businesses understand the voice conversations that were happening. And then there’s also an opportunity to say, what about the in-person meeting? And a lot of people probably then start thinking about, does Alexis start showing up in the workplace and is that the note taking half of the future or a piece of hardware, but I’m like, look, we all walk around with a great device in our pockets, and can capture stereo quality audio at 44 killer Hertz.

And really all of that it would require is an app. And a unique opportunity for us is when you use Dialpad, we have a mobile app. So now we have a delivery mechanism to actually capture the audio for the in-person meeting and then start thinking about doing interesting things there. So when we think longterm about our roadmap, there’s often a question of does Dialpad get into hardware and we partner with Amazon or Google and I’m like, what? There’s a piece of hardware in our pocket. It requires an app. Now there’s some technical challenges that happen when you try to capture multiple people speaking through a mobile device. But that also presents a really unique opportunity to think about. 

David Yakobovitch

That makes sense. Especially if it was in-person meetings where you have three, four, five dozen people on them, it’s a lot of the note taking, knowing who’s what, and I’ve used Amazon transcribe and recognition and with the softwares, whether it’s visual or it’s voice-based, you can recognize who’s speaking. And that’s also the same with Dialpad’s AI with its voice intelligence.

You have a sister product called Uberconference, which is all about conferencing for those big teams. And, in my former life, when I ran media and sports ventures, we’d have so many people on these calls and that product was just a godsend. How has the integration of UberConference into Dialpad Ben as well?

Dan O´Connell

So Uberconference is funny because I started using Uberconference probably 10 years ago. And so it’s funny to then kind of go through an acquisition of a product and a team that you’re familiar with to kind of say like, now I get to sit in a room and talk strategy and think about building a business with them.

Uberconference is a fantastic product. As I said, I used it or started using it probably a decade ago. And that integration is it entirely seamless to the Dialpad experience. So a big thing for us is being able to start a conversation and take it from a voiceover IP conversation or a cloud conversation to then making it a web conferencing conversation if you want it to. So, anyway, that’s probably not the best answer on that staff. 

David Yakobovitch

No worries. But I do like the point of web conferencing because the industry is evolving so fast. There’s so many trends out there and before our recording today, we’re just talking about the market, everyone from Slack and Discord to yourself and Aircall. It’s almost like IRC is back in fashion and there’s all these new trends. How you seeing the market evolve. 

Dan O´Connell

So when you think about the trends, do you think business communications, when you think as an overall industries, probably one of the hottest spaces to be in right now, you can see this in both public markets and also just in the private markets, in terms of where investments are being made across the board.

For me, like every business, especially these days faces the same problems, which is. How do we hire people? How do we grow faster? There’s definitely a trend to more businesses being more open to having remote employees or just teams really spread throughout the world. These technologies are allowing that to actually happen.

And that’s a trend that’s actually probably going to become even more prevalent, but I don’t think it’s going in the future, and I’m talking, 5 or 10 years, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be the past norm of, you have to have a headquarters and that’s where everyone needs. And if you need, if you want a job there, you have to live there. 

And again, It becomes because of these technologies, whether it’s voice, video, text messaging, the ability to have high quality or high definition video of somebody across the planet in a super seamless way. And then how do you utilize things like real-time speech recognition to do a translation?

So perhaps you’re speaking Japanese and I’m speaking English and you have technologies that can naturally allow us to communicate in a really seamless way, even though we may not be speaking the same language. 

David Yakobovitch

I was talking with a fund out in Korea just a few weeks ago and we were talking about investment opportunities and they said, we’re interested in investing in people all over the world. They don’t have to be in Korea. And I said, that’s so fascinating. They said, no, they only have to move to Korea. It’s the new digital age. So it’s amazing how companies are global. We still have time zones for now, at least. 

Dan O´Connell

And I say that, it sounds really easy to say, you can use all these technologies and hire people all over the world to do it. If he asked me to build a startup, honestly, I would probably want my core team to be in person. So I do think that there are definitely opportunities to build remote teams. I also think that also presents a really difficult challenges around culture and connectedness as well. Personally, I love showing up in the office every day. I love having that sense of camaraderie with people. And I do think even remotely that gets lost a little bit. You have to really make the extra effort when you connect with people remotely we’re doing this podcast, but we have the video on to see each other. 

And that’s one of those things that if we turn to the video off, we would probably actually have a little bit less of a sense of connectedness. And it would probably feel a little bit less personal. So I do think that that stuff can get really difficult if you’re trying to do that with 16 people in 16 different locations. 

David Yakobovitch

A lot of companies have been going through the dilemma of going public and going private and bringing teams centralized versus going remote. One of the classic examples a few years ago was a Yahoo with Marissa Meyer where she brought everyone back together in one central space. And I don’t think personally anything was wrong with that? I don’t think Yahoo’s troubles could be solved by bringing everyone back in one space, but I personally applaud her for the effort that she did there. It’s interesting. You talked about the core team. So why do you think it’s important for the core team to be centralized? 

Dan O´Connell

Early on anytime you’re building a startup and I frame this as what I have learned in my time of trying to run a startup. And, I grew up in Silicon Valley all of my life and have been part of a few different high-growth organizations. The challenge is like building a startup is probably one of the most difficult things that you can do. You show up in Silicon Valley, you’re trying to compete for talent. You probably don’t have enough money to actually attract the right talent when you’re trying to sell a vision that hasn’t been proven and you’re going up against the Goliath of the world. It’s meant to be this heroic adventure. 

And that alone to be successful is one of the hardest things to go and do. And if you then said, we’re all going to go work in four different time zones across the planet to try to pull that off. It makes the challenge that much more difficult not to say it can’t be done. I just know myself and my experiences, I would probably opt for, you can have a fully remote team or you can run that problem with the team every day and show up with them. I would probably opt for that, I’m going to show up with them at least initially, Until you get some sense of scale or some sense of success.

David Yakobovitch

I feel like even for those remote teams, there are technologies that perhaps it could be used in the future to emulate those in-person meetings. Virtual reality has been around since the 1980s, and now it seems to be coming of age with Oculus and the new products. Augmented reality has been around for quite a while. Google Glass version 2.0 is coming out. Do you think AR VR, one of them might take off in the next few years to emulate those remote meetings? 

Dan O´Connell

It has to, anytime somebody talks to me about how to do a future of  myself or what are kind of the most interesting opportunities to get into. I do think it’s voice. You’d mentioned voices is the next input for a lot of our devices. Now becoming prevalent in home. It’s not yet prevalent in all of our cars. It’s not yet prevalent in business. So we’ll see that transition happened. But to me, it’s voice. And then it’s obviously VR and AR. 

And VR and AR have different applications, but what’s missing today from this connective is we are still utilizing somewhat old technology. And I say old technologies, not that, not in a negative way, but we don’t have the winning VR app yet. We’ve all seen, or many of us have probably seen ready player one that will happen right. Probably in our lifetime. And it’s going to be really unique and it’s going to be crazy. And it’s going to be pretty fun, but we’re not there yet, but that will happen. And that’s going to create a real difference in terms of connectedness, both for work, but also for personal and for families. 

David Yakobovitch

One of the keys to creating a ready player one lifestyle is having a lot of data and also being able to run it in real time, very fast. And with Fiber, it’s been such a challenge because it’s not everywhere. It’s very costly. Even with the most recent challenges with the trade war between the US and China with Huawei. You know that Huawei now owns 30% of the world’s fiber? No one knew that they built that and it’s interesting, but fiber cannot be the solution because it’s not a global way to have all the telecommunication.

So there’s these new technologies on the horizon. One is 5G. We’ve been talking about it for a few years. Another one is Cube Sets. Which is what space X is doing, launching satellites into space that ideally will be on the internet into remote areas. What’s your take on both 5G and cube sets? 

Dan O´Connell

So 5G, obviously, is going to be the game changer that we all hope it to be and expect it to be. And again, to your point, limitations of technology, the beauty about technology is really you can go and build and do anything. The challenge, and you mentioned this really access to data and processing power. The cloud has changed our ability to go and compute in the cloud. And I don’t need now a server, that’s the size of a room to go and process things. I can now go do that somewhere else. 

And, then you said access to data, which is, I’ve got to be able to crunch things and learn from them really quickly. So I do think that like 5G will change the game in terms of the application or what the applications will be able to accomplish.

David Yakobovitch

That’s exciting. And I’m also very bullish on the cubeSATs. Elon Musk love him or hate him. He talks all about really interesting ideas. And I just think about rural access, if you’re in a farm in the Midwest where fiber will not come to, can the satellites solve that, so should be interesting.

And I don’t know if that’s going to be this year and next year, but I do know that regardless of all of these technologies, What we’re seeing is that open source is eating the world. Even a lot of the NLP and AI and analytics that you worked in, a talk IQ and now a Dialpad. A lot of this is inspired from open source, like Python and TensorFlow. And these systems. Does your team use a lot of open source today and where do you think that’s going? 

Dan O´Connell

So anytime somebody says, they built something from the ground up, when you really get into the weeds of it, you pretty much start looking at open source software with optimization. So we’ve always been huge fans of open source software at talk IQ and my past lives at Google. So I do think that look, oftentimes people will say, we’re doing really great things. We spend all of this time and energy building this ourselves. 

And they’re actually really good open source options that you can leverage, that are out there in the world and allow you to actually build things faster and can do that actually are just as good as I would say, licensed software.

David Yakobovitch

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Dan O´Connell

So I very much view as again as we become more connected and access to data becomes more, even more prevalent. And, organizations like Github are providing that opportunity and learnings that open source software is going to continue to get better and better. And it’s going to be interesting to see the dynamic that creates in the future. 

David Yakobovitch

Now, Microsoft bought GitHub just in the past year for a lot of money and everyone feared GitHub going to become closed source. And one interesting thing that GitHub rolled out a feature recently, which was a Patreon type feature that you could do your development on GitHub.

And then, developers could say, I’m going to support that creative craft. I don’t know how to feel about that. It’s really cool from the Indy movement of, I can build something and get the support and funding, but then it almost feels like it’s going to change the platform from very Indy to very powerful.

Dan O´Connell

So you’re telling me to share whereas coming back.

David Yakobovitch

Everything’s full circle, Like IRC is now Slack. 

Dan O´Connell

Everything does come full circle. It’s now cool again. So like, It’s my take on this is probably similar to creators on YouTube and know different social networks that look, if you’re doing stuff and in your own time and creating value and people want to give a donation to you, that’s great. 

And there are obviously always going to be businesses that push that threshold or individuals that push that threshold a little bit too much and make it suddenly feel very commercial. And I also think there are people that hold their values and say, look like. If you want to donate this or donate to this cause because it’s helping you build a business, then I would appreciate that.

And I don’t have any expectation of what that is. The challenge again is how do you kind of balance that dynamic? And again, share with growing up and, I saw Shareware and utilized that for independent developers and I would get it. I was like, this person’s probably spending all of their time and wants to actually make perhaps some living from it, then they should have an opportunity to do that. So I don’t have to necessarily fall in like either camp of, this is right or wrong outside, the beauty of open source software and places like GitHub is that you can go and learn and it doesn’t cost you anything. And how do you actually balance that? is the challenge for those companies. 

David Yakobovitch

And, shareware and coming back to a donate only model, isn’t only with GitHub now in early June 2019, Tim Ferriss said, he’s launching an experiment. He said for his podcast with Tim Ferris for the next six months, he’s not going to take any sponsors, any ads or anything. He’s going to go completely donation, only model, which you’ve never seen before and that space. And I don’t know how to feel about it. I love him. I bought all his books. He has some fantastic information, but to go donation only when you’re pretty much as big as Joe Rogan when it comes to podcasting, kind of threw me for a loop for a second.

Dan O´Connell

If you have a large enough base it’s there’s less risk in doing that again, I’m a huge fan of Tim Ferriss and if you’re at the top, then you probably can take that chance, knowing that at the end of the day, there’s probably going to be enough people that turn around and say, I’m going to support you.

And I’m going to donate to that because I want you to be able to do it as opposed to having to think about ads. 

Again, probably more difficult for somebody that’s just starting off with a podcast. Now I can tell you what that outcome probably looks like for most people, not necessarily for everybody. But It’s probably less risky to go and take that experiment. And, honestly, I’m super curious to see what happens.

David Yakobovitch

Me too. So maybe I’ll give Tim Ferris a few bucks and see if that model works out. 

Dan O´Connell

But if you can look at streamers on Twitch and creators again on YouTube and things like that. And, you don’t necessarily have to pay to subscribe for those individuals. And a lot of those individuals make their living on Patreon and donations. And so there’s been. We’ve seen some tales of success from that. And so you can leverage that to say, is this a good decision or a bad decision? Let me just try it out and understand the risks. 

David Yakobovitch

And speaking of risks involved, advertising is the part that Tim Ferriss is forsaking for the next six months and, diving into your past life with ads, It’s a very fascinating industry always evolving today, video and photo ads seem to be the new thing on platforms like Google and Facebook and Snapchat and other ad auction platforms. But most recently, both LinkedIn and Pinterest have been rolling out ad platforms as well to further monetize their products. What do you think about them getting into the game? 

Dan O´Connell

So, like competition is always a good thing. We’ve seen over the past probably 15 years, a lot of the ad market now revolves around obviously Google and Facebook and what they’ve done. And then it comes into kind of the niche players. And I say niche players in a good way. Pinterest and LinkedIn are two platforms that I use. They’re exceptional. And they also have very specific audiences. And because they have very specific audiences, both of those businesses recognize the opportunity for advertisers to connect.

And they don’t necessarily want to open up those audiences to perhaps people they’re competing against in terms of Facebook and Google for ad dollars. So, having a closed off approach, running their own audience network, so having advertisers to come to them presents unique, provides a unique business opportunity.

It’s to be somewhat controversial. It’s probably the only way that LinkedIn is owned is no longer independent, but interest is obviously still an independent company. They kind of have to do it. I don’t know if they could survive long term with ads being opened up to Facebook and Google. But again, I’m not in those businesses. I haven’t been in that business for a long time. So I’ll take back my controversial stay. I’ll walk back by controversial statement, slightly on that. 

David Yakobovitch

No worries. And maybe to segue into the topic of the podcast today, which is all about voice and voice and data of obviously we’re here. So I just have my landline as well in 2019. And one of my favorite topics when I’m grabbing drinks with friends is the death of the landline. When is the landline going to go away? 

And when I moved into a new building a couple of years ago with fiber and gigabyte internet, basically the package that included the landline, the cable internet, and the data was cheaper than just the data or the cable package alone. So what’s your take on the depth of the landline and if bundling and unbundling of services will impact that. 

Dan O´Connell

So the depth of the landline happens when my mom gives it up because she just bought a new house and put it up. The same thing happens. It was cheaper to bundle it. I honestly don’t know if that is because they’re public companies and are actually trying to maintain subscriber growth, which is ultimately probably what I would be doing. It doesn’t make any sense. My mom never uses the landline. There’s color on her cell phone, but the bundling and unbundling of services is really interesting. I’ve cut the cords. Probably two plus years ago, I haven’t missed it at all. 

And then you kind of look at what’s happening within the streaming markets though, that now you have Netflix subscription, you have an HBO go subscription, and you’re soon going to have content pulled off of Netflix from Disney and now Disney is going to have a subscription service. So it’s almost like. Everything’s going to become these spirit packages that you’re going to have to go pay for. And then at some point what’s old becomes new. Again, we’ll go back to having just a package that becomes more cost efficient and we’ll just close the loop and go back. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens.

It is a wonky time for some of these businesses right now in terms of the landline dying, but telephone is not, that’s something distinct to highlight, but I do think that they’re trying to hold on to some of these services perhaps because of some business pressure. 

David Yakobovitch

Sure. And speaking of cutting the cord, it’s almost like actually cutting the cord. How unified communications have caused a lot of customers to move away from Avaya to move away from Disco and to move on to platforms like Dialpad and UberConference. Why do you think people are cutting the cord in the voice space? And is it because people maybe want a second and third number, they want to be able to work remotely. They want access to talking anytime, anywhere what’s some of your thoughts on that? 

Dan O´Connell

The biggest trend that we’ve seen is the rise of the mountain worker, which nobody wants to be tied to just to their desk anymore. Much of what we were kind of highlighted, but people want the freedom of mobility. And when it gets into, cutting the cord and we talked a little bit before we started the podcast, just on people having multiple numbers. 

And the beauty of products like dial pad or and whether it’s one of our competitors is you can have a business phone number on your personal device. And that allows you to actually manage that in a really unique way that I can have my business contacts and I can have my personal contacts and I’ll have to worry about them, the lines getting blurred. 

And that’s also an important trend that we see is there’s a lot of focus now on like, I want to have my business life. And when I have my personal life and I don’t want them to bleed over, because we’re getting to a place where it’s like, you have to be connected all of the time and everything’s the same. So the two trends that we see though, are the rise of the modern worker and providing the flexibility and the cloud allows us to do that. And then it comes down to people want to be able to have a business line and on their personal device and be able to manage that in a really seamless way. And there’s a lot of opportunities. 

David Yakobovitch

No need to have two phones anymore when you can have one device. 

Dan O´Connell

That it’s funny. Anytime I see somebody with that, they show up with their, I go to dinner with somebody and they’ve got two phones and it’s like, here’s my personal phone and here’s my business from they’ve provisioned. They immediately goes off in my head. It’s like that company has probably provisioned a thousand dollars. They’ve got a new iPhone. So you’ve got a thousand dollar piece of hardware that’s been provisioned. 

And then you’re picking up the data plan on it. And it’s like, what you could do is. You can sign up for Dialpad, and you can go kit, to sell a film a little bit and you can get your or business line, and it’s all handled through an app and it takes over the call to the call kit on the phone. And it works in a super seamless way. And again, it doesn’t, that’s what all of us are kind of thinking about and seeing. And so that presents a really unique opportunity for our business. 

David Yakobovitch

Let’s talk about scaling teams and scaling sales, both when you were a talk IQ and now at Dialpad, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you’ve solved and advice that you could recommend to other startups that are?

Dan O´Connell

So, one is, obviously there’s the talent Wars that are going on. And so like one of the biggest challenges that we’ve been faced with is we’re a high growth startup. We added a hundred people last year, we’re going to add another hundred plus this year. And so one of the biggest challenges for our ability to scale comes down to where do you find that talent?

And this gets back into a little bit of their earlier conversation, which is, how do we leverage our own technologies in a way that allows us to hire in places we may not normally think about. And so we’ve opened up offices throughout the world in a way that we can then hire talent no matter where that exceptional talent might be.

And startups have to think about that. I know we were talking a little bit of like, you got to have your core team in one place when you’re early on. But one is you don’t have to only build your team in San Francisco or New York. And if you try to do that, I honestly think it’s pretty difficult. They’re the two most expensive labor markets in the world super competitive. San Francisco has near zero unemployment. Anybody that leaves a job today will get a job tomorrow. So that’s a crazy place to try to find time. And when you get into loyalty or, is that person going to stick around?

Those are also very real challenges where there are the next big startup. There’s the next large public company that’s doing exceptionally well. It is now breaking out again. And those are tough forces to compete against. If you want to play, it’s kind of like being an Oakland days and you got to figure out how to play the game a little bit differently. Cause you’re in just a smaller market. 

David Yakobovitch

Have you thought about hiring robots like Sophia, the digital citizen? 

Dan O´Connell

Said no, no robots for us. Not yet, heartache It’s funny, anytime that anytime I get into the AI conversations, usually there’s that somebody will ask about it, the robots coming for our jobs and when are they showing up?

And I’m like, we’re a long way away from that. Our belief in all of this. And my personal belief is like, we’ll use AI. 

And when I talk about AI speech recognition and LP, we’ll use these technologies to augment in-person experiences. I personally enjoy talking with people and connecting with them and we’re decades away, honestly, from, having true AI that can do exceptional things. That’s my personal take on it, but I might now we’re far away from things. 

David Yakobovitch

One final question that’s been on my mind for a while is thinking about the future of work and the future of work we talked about earlier could be centralized, or it could be also remote and distributed. And as the future of work is becoming virtual and virtual as the new office and teams are scaling up. In addition to any of the software recommendations What are some of the best practices you would recommend for remote work cultures to build a good team?

Dan O´Connell

So the first one is any time you connect with somebody remotely by turning on video. And it’s really easy to actually a lot of people will start web conferences with people turning off the video. It’s just, I don’t know what it is like, it’s a human habit. So number one is when you’re working with somebody remote understands that there’s a lot of the hallway conversations that get lost. A lot of the moments actually connect and just say, hello, give a high five, whatever it might be. 

And so, always anytime I have to manage somebody remote and I have promoted a remote team today is making sure I turn on the video. I also find ways to just connect with them, which is randomly all actually try to set up a web conference, just to chat with them and an Uberconference, just to chat with them and connect and say thank you or tell them that I appreciate them. And again, it’s ways to try to force those hallway conversations. Because again, those are the moments that we kind of take for granted. Literally I walk around giving a lot of high fives to people, but that doesn’t happen to my team. That’s in Kitchener, Waterloo, which is just outside Toronto.

So those are ones too is finding ways to get it. If you have employees in different offices out to the headquarters or just together. So we actually find time, at least once a year, if not twice a year, to get everybody together from all of our different offices and bring them just as a way to connect and get together. Because if you’re just a fully remote team, you probably get used to that. But then when you get everybody together, the thing that always happens is people learn new things. They feel a sense, a greater sense of comradery. And you got to make those extra efforts on those pieces.

And then the last piece is just over-communication. And that’s something that we can take for granted when we work every day together in the same office. But again, if you’re running a fully remote team, you really have to focus on over communicating again. And so you really have to push yourself to be really clear and concise and even share too much. Just so they can understand everything that’s happening or what the business is thinking about. 

David Yakobovitch

That’s awesome. And perhaps to share a little bit more as well. I love that Dialpad is so focused based on visual voice and visual audio. And if I can get a sneak peek, I’m just curious to know any plans in the future for visual Video in the Dialpad suite of products. 

Dan O´Connell

I have a big smile on my face that you can’t see, but we will, we’ll have some cool announcements in the very near term on multi-party video. 

David Yakobovitch

That’s fantastic. I love how all the products, Adele pad helped me better manage my workflow and truly is building a society where humans are augmented by AI and machine learning. And I can’t wait to get my hands on that beta product in the next near term as well. So, Dan, thanks so much for being on the HumAIn Podcast. 

Dan O´Connell

Thanks for having me.

David Yakobovitch

Humans. Thanks for listening to this episode of HumAIn. My name is Dave Yakobovitch. And if you like HumAIn, remember to click subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Luminary. Thanks for tuning in. Join us for our next episode. New releases are every Tuesday.