Give a voice to your enterprise applications

Imagine having lunch with your colleagues and laughing your way to glory over frivolous jokes, when your phone suddenly displays a text message. It is the Boss! And the boss badly needs you to send the top 10 customers by sales for that month in Australia. “I need it now!”

What would you do? Leave the lunch table, possibly your lunch as well and rush back to your desk. Find the information and email it across to the Boss. And while emailing it, you are probably swearing at your boss.

But, what if, you had an app on your phone, where you could just speak, “Who are the top 5 customers by sales for this month in Australia?” and the phone displays the list. And you now say, “Email to Jeff!”. And it perfectly obeys your command. This sounds like a Siri or a Google Now. Not for finding the nearest Thai place, but for making you more productive at your work-place. A voice enabled enterprise-mobile (VEEM) app that works with your enterprise applications.

A simple voice command can be systematically converted into a structured query that links to the enterprise database and fetches relevant information to the user, Siri/Google Now style. This is limited not just to display of information or reports, but also transaction processing.

You could also say, “Create a Purchase Order for Vendor XYZ Inc. for Raw material RM1 for a quantity of 100 units.” The workflow understands your organizational data and can create the purchase order after you hit a confirmation button. Imagine the benefits of such VEEM applications and the productivity it creates for your workforce!  

We are already seeing a lot of consumer-like behavior in the enterprise world. E.g. companies are looking to subscribe rather than buy, pay as you grow, etc. Something we like to do in our personal lives. If we can order Google Now to navigate to the nearest Cheese Cake factory, why can’t we order a Google Now like app to create a transactional record or merely display and share a report. 

Which companies are willing to invest in a technology like this? Is your company ready?