The days of the traditional conference call or voice mail message are quickly fading. In this video, you’ll learn how unified voice services have changed the way we communicate.
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As human beings, we have so many different ways to communicate. It’s very common that we might have a wire telephone at work so that we’re able to send and receive calls. You might also have a wire telephone at home so you can make calls when you’re at home. And these days, we also have mobile devices as well. You might have a mobile phone. So there might be three phone numbers right there that are all associated just for calling you.
There’s also voicemail. If somebody doesn’t get you on the phone, then you’ll have voicemails to listen to after the fact. Maybe we can also send an email to communicate. There’s a text based process. it rarely has anything to do with voice.
And of course, you have conferencing methods that you can use for audio. There’s web conferences. There’s video conferences you can participate in. Those also rarely use that traditional phone line. You have all of these different ways to communicate. There must be an easier way to bring all of this together so that we can easily communicate with one another.
This idea of a singular method of communication is called unified communications. It’s one that takes all of those different methods of communicating, and integrates them together, and attempts to really make them a seamless way to communicate, and allows you to talk and communicate with people, regardless of where you might be and what you might be doing.
For instance, now we’re not tethered to a phone. It’s not even necessarily plugged into the wall. It’s one where you’re communicating over IP with voice over IP, and you can, of course, not only communicate through voice that way. You can communicate data through that method as well. In this method, you wouldn’t even need different phone numbers. You have one single phone number, and wherever you happen to be– whether you’re at work, whether you’re mobile, or whether you’re at home– people would be able to communicate with you simply by calling a single number. That’s so much easier than trying so many different numbers to try to find out where you might be at any particular time.
We’ve taken this idea of unified communication, and we’ve also applied it to our voicemails. We think of voicemail as traditionally being something audible, but these days, you have speech to text technologies that can take that voicemail and put it in a text form so that you can also receive it as a text message or as an email. So no matter where you might be– if you’re somewhere where you can’t listen to a voicemail, you still might be able to read it and even respond to it with text as well. That means that you can really take all of these different technologies with video, and voice, and text communication and blend them all together.
So you can start a text message with someone, click a button, and suddenly be in a video conference. Take that video conference and move it to your desktop. Take that after the conference is over and then turn it just into an audio form so that you can then go somewhere in your car. It doesn’t matter what the method is. That entire process is completely seamless and all unified together with unified communication.