Salesforce is shutting down two of its AI voice services (Einstein Voice Assistant and Voice Skills) as it shifts resources to its recently launched Salesforce Anywhere app, as detected by Voicebot.ai. A company spokesperson told VentureBeat that voice capabilities remain “a priority” for Salesforce, and that the products it is discontinuing will inform the development of “reinvented” functionalities focused on productivity and collaboration.
Launched in beta last year, the Einstein Voice Assistant was a component of Salesforce’s Einstein Voice, an outgrowth of the company’s Einstein technology that enables customers to navigate cloud services hands-free. One of its apparent advantages over other platforms was its versatility: it was in silos, restricting data extraction to individual user accounts, and you could “teach” to recognize jargon, acronyms, and jargon in an organization’s lexicon.
Einstein Voice Assistant was more than a glorified transcriptionist. Users can update Salesforce records and create tasks using natural language requests, or touch Einstein Voice Assistant to navigate through Einstein Analytics dashboards and surface metrics, such as open service cases and performance guidance. Plus, thanks to native integration with popular voice assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa, Einstein Voice Assistant could deliver a daily summary of “key priorities” such as upcoming calendar appointments and gear portfolio updates.
Meanwhile, Einstein Voice Skills (formerly Einstein Voice Builder) was a set of tools that supported the creation of corporate voice-based applications. From a configuration page, developers and administrators selected customer relationship management actions, such as updating a field, creating a task, or reading a prediction, and the fields or objects that reported each of those actions. Applications can be created specifically for the needs of employee roles or teams, and Einstein Voice Skills allowed you to control how information was read (for example, next steps and follow-up tasks) and the channels and devices on which applications were accessible.
Both Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills were available on a variety of devices, including third-party smart speakers, smart displays, and a company-centric concept device called the Einstein Smart Speaker.
“We believe that enhanced AI conversation interfaces can transform business processes, so we are focusing heavily on innovation in this area and developing voice across the Salesforce system,” said Michael Machado, senior product manager at Einstein Voice last November. “Voice enables companies to order and retrieve information from Salesforce in a natural way, making an already powerful system even more powerful.”
Starting today, Salesforce remains part of the Voice Interoperability Initiative, a program spearheaded by Amazon to ensure that voice-enabled products such as smart speakers provide users with access to interoperable assistants. When Salesforce confirmed its membership in September, the company said its goal was to ensure that users could take advantage of the skills and features that Einstein Voice Assistant offers on a variety of devices.
Salesforce’s shifting priorities are perhaps an implicit acknowledgment of voice market competitiveness. In February, Microsoft removed all third-party skills for Cortana, its voice platform, by refocusing the technology for the company. Amazon offers a rival business voice service on Alexa for Business, which integrates with Concur to share business travel itinerary information, RingCentral for voicemail readings, and other third-party voice services for corporate customers.
In particular, Salesforce’s decision to cut Einstein Voice Assistant and Voice Skills follows the departure of Chief Scientist Richard Socher. During his four years at Salesforce, Socher, formerly of MetaMind, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016, oversaw R&D initiatives, as well as the growth of Einstein’s cloud AI services for use cases like vision. by computer, natural language models, translation and custom CRM. Search results.
