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Dubber Corporation Ltd (ASX: DUB) (Dubber or Company) is aware of media and regulatory reports indicating a potential closure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) operations in the US and UK. The Company is continuing in its efforts to recover these funds and there is no material impact on Dubber’s liquidity position or operations as a consequence of this event.

Dubber Corporation Ltd (ASX: DUB) has completed a review of efficiencies and costs across its global operations and will implement a restructure of its business. This is expected to deliver in excess of $5 million in savings per quarter without impacting the Company’s revenue growth potential or customer service.

Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX:DUB) the leading conversational intelligence and unified recording platform for service providers and their customers globally, today released its Interim Financial Report for the half-year ending 31 December 2022.

Together, Dubber & NTSCOM are helping Microsoft Teams users meet compliance requirements, elevate customer experience, automate workflows, and increase productivity across a wide array of business verticals. Customers have immediate and seamless access to Dubber’s compliant and secure conversation capture and insights solution through NTSCOM via iPILOT.

Businesses in regulated industries can now create a compliant, easily accessible recording of every conversation in one place – critical for meeting regulatory compliance mandates. With the recent trend towards hybrid and remote working, the explosion in the usage of communications platforms like Microsoft Teams has never been more important.

However, there is an opportunity for businesses to do more with their conversation data beyond compliance. Dubber and NTSCOM are enabling businesses to improve business outcomes.

Here are a few sector-specific examples:

Healthcare

The healthcare landscape is constantly changing, so Dubber and NTSCOM have partnered to deliver  flexible solutions for customers in this sector. Organizations can now keep up pace with changing compliance requirements, but also use information-rich conversation data to improve the quality of healthcare provided and staff productivity.

In October of 2022, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) strategic vision of expanding access to affordable health care and improving health equity was advanced when, under the Affordable Healthcare Act, new compliance and recording rules went into play. During the enrollment period, Medicare & Medicaid Services will require all supplemental insurance sellers to record and retain all marketing and sales conversations for 10 years. See CMS Recording Mandate.

The use of telemedicine has increased significantly over the past few years as well, and voice intelligence plays an increasingly essential role in accelerating better-automated customer experience with telemedicine – both for providers and patients.  With Dubber, customers can:

• Improve patient outcomes and resolve disputes through the elimination of manual note-taking with automated transcriptions
• Meet regulatory and legal requirements (CMS Mandate)
• Seamlessly monitor and supervise to maintain conduct standards, safeguard electronically protected health information, and avoid any data breaches (ePHI)

Education

While local, state, and Federal education policies may differ, the need for unified call recording has never been so crucial in education.  The pandemic provided the opportunity for a surge in online instruction: whether asynchronous, synchronous, or hybrid, many institutions are continuing to offer multiple ways to complete coursework. There is now an increased need for accessibility, accountability, and capturing lectures, group work, and other in-class activities. All this is essential to improve online learning standards for stakeholders at all levels: teachers, students, parents, administration and government agencies.

Institutions at all levels heavily use video conferencing and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams to engage students and improve performance.  Integrating Dubber’s suite of voice recording tools allows customers to:

• Uncover student insights and provide a record of student contacts and conversations
• Capture learning on every platform without the cost and limits of application-specific and legacy platforms
• Meet compliance mandates for education at all levels

Government

Governments, too, are increasing their use of innovative technology.  This provides huge benefits to oversight, employees, and the public.

Technology with value-added services such as Dubber increases organizational efficiencies, minimizes spending across all departments and simplifies the processes that inherently bog down public service. Dubber allows federal, state, and local governments to:

• Quickly, accurately and easily fulfill compliance and public information requests.
• Obtain high-quality training and recording insights that can be used to improve coaching, as well as employee onboarding and upskilling
• Improve data collection for feedback to other governmental agencies or departments
• Enhance public safety with the capture and storage of critical communications

Dubber’s leading conversation capture and intelligence solutions can now be purchased by customers and partners directly through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, which includes

the Azure Marketplace and Microsoft Appsource. The marketplace connects to over 4 million monthly active shoppers and more than 90,000 CSP (Cloud Solution Providers) globally.

This follows Dubber’s recent achievement of Azure IP Co-Sell Incentive Status– a collaborative agreement that enables Dubber to work directly with Microsoft sales teams and Microsoft partners on joint selling opportunities.

These two major milestones demonstrate the important and strengthening relationship between Dubber and Microsoft. The accomplishment also reflects Dubber’s continued commitment and focus on driving Azure consumption and becoming the leading compliant Microsoft Teams capture and insights solution in 2023.

Together, Dubber and Microsoft are enabling partners and their customers access to a conversational capture and intelligence platform that is Microsoft certified and ensures compliance with all major global communications regulations.

Microsoft Commercial Marketplace Transactable

There are four Dubber products available on the Commercial Marketplace: Dubber Recording (available via select partners), Dubber Unified Capture, Dubber Insights, and Notes Pro by Dubber. These solutions enable organisations to unlock the potential of every conversation and deliver critical business insights for compliance, CX, dispute resolution, productivity, coaching and more. For Service providers looking to transact through the marketplace, this solution allows a secure and rapid path to differentiation and revenue.

What does this mean for customers?

Dubber is “Azure benefit eligible” which means that eligible end customers can use purchases of Dubber to contribute towards their Microsoft Azure consumption commitments (MACC).

What does this mean for partners?

Resellers and communication service providers (Microsoft Cloud Partners) can benefit from a simple transaction and payment process, including guaranteed on-time payment by Microsoft. By transacting Dubber in the marketplace, resellers may also receive additional opportunities with Microsoft managed customers.

Additionally, communications service providers can take advantage of a zero cost and expedited means of transacting Dubber sales without having to “productise” the solutions.

About the Azure Marketplace:

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

Want to learn more?

Visit Dubber on Microsoft Appsource
Visit Dubber on Azure Marketplace

• Expanded mobile recording capabilities from Virgin Media O2’s network now available to small to medium-sized business (SMB) and public service sector customers
• Significantly extends the existing relationship where Dubber is the Mobile recording service for enterprise customers
• Unified recording and intelligence ties in mobile, Microsoft Teams, Cisco, and Zoom with transcription and sentiment analysis using AI
• Intelligent call recording and Dubber AI switch on immediately to deliver value across compliance, customer, people, and sales

Melbourne, Australia and LONDON – 15 February 2023 – Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB), the leading unified recording and intelligence platform for service providers and their customers globally, has significantly expanded its partnership capability with Virgin Media O2 Business giving customers an increased range of mobile recording services and access to connected systems via one platform, provided over Virgin Media O2’s network.

Virgin Media O2 is one of the UK’s largest telecommunications service providers with more than 47 million UK connections across broadband, mobile, TV and home phone, and passes 16 million premises with its own fixed network. This expanded partnership, which transitions Dubber from a vendor to a strategic partner for unified recording and intelligence, will provide Virgin Media O2 Business customers with access to the full Dubber product suite.

Customers will benefit from additional services ranging from AI-enabled transcription to sentiment analysis, with support for platforms including: Cisco Webex (CSCO), Microsoft Teams (MSFT) and Zoom (ZM)enabling customers to host and track recordings across a range of systems through a single, secure platform. Expanding on these benefits, the Dubber product suite provides intelligent features to support businesses in meeting client needs. This goes beyond traditional transcription services to provide sentiment analysis of secure and consensual recordings; features that can be used by businesses to support a range of purposes including customer service and dispute resolution to regulatory compliance, sales automation and intelligence, productivity, and employee training.

Dubber and Virgin Media O2 Business’s partnership will enable customers to unlock the potential of every conversation across mobile and unified communications. Last year, Gartner predicted that ‘in 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analysed’ enabling businesses across all industries to discover added organisational value. Dubber is ahead of the curve with tasks such as compliance, workplace engagement and training all being answered through a service-native solution that switches on with a click.

Andrew Halliwell, Product Director, Virgin Media O2 said:

“This expanded partnership creates new opportunities for our long-term relationship with Dubber and extends a wider range of services to our customers. The Dubber product suite coupled with Virgin Media O2’s mobile and broadband network will provide our SMB and public sector customers with greater mobile recording insights in one place, enabling them to make more informed decisions to address their productivity, compliance and intelligence needs.”

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber:

“Today’s announcement is a testament to the strength of the partnership between Dubber and Virgin Media O2 and our shared vision for a fully automated and self-service cloud solution. Addressing unified recording and intelligence on both mobile and UC networks unlocks a significant addressable market for both Dubber and VMO2 – enabling more conversations than ever before to be tapped for insights. We look forward to continuing to work closely with VMO2 to deliver greater value to their users as we develop the next generation of unified recording services together.”

 ENDS 

About Dubber:

Dubber enables Service Providers to unlock the potential of the network – turning every conversation into an exponential source of value for differentiated innovation, retention and revenue. Listed on the ASX, Dubber is the clear market leader in conversational intelligence and unified recording – embedded at the heart of over 175 service provider networks.

For more information, please visit Dubber at www.dubber.net

About Virgin Media O2

Virgin Media O2 launched on 1 June 2021, combining the UK’s largest and most reliable mobile network with a broadband network offering the fastest widely-available broadband speeds. It is a customer-first organisation that brings a range of connectivity services together in one place with a clear mission: to upgrade the nation. Virgin Media O2 is the corporate brand of the 50:50 joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica SA, and one of the UK’s largest businesses.

The company has 47 million UK connections across broadband, mobile, TV and home phone. Its own fixed network currently passes 16.0 million premises alongside a mobile network that covers 99% of the nation’s population with 4G, and more than 800 towns and cities with 5G services targeting 50% population coverage in 2023.

For more information, contact:

Investors & Media
VMO2
Leia Karam
leia.karam@virginmediao2.co.uk
+44 (0)7478 693 445

Dubber
Terry Alberstein
terry@navigatecommunication.com.au
+61 (0) 458 484 921

Dubber EMEA
Stephanie Forrest
Stephanie@wearetfd.com
+44 7917 695 755

Dubber Corporation Ltd (ASX: DUB) (Dubber or the Company) is pleased to announce the appointment of Neil Wilson as Chair effective today.

Neil is an experienced business leader and entrepreneur with corporate, start-up, founder and public company experience. He holds a Bachelor of Business degree and is a CPA and Member of the Australian Computer Society.

Neil is a practitioner in the digital and technology domain and has extensive experience in general management and CEO management across private and public company scenarios.

He held the position of Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Oakton Limited (ASX:OKN), until its acquisition by Dimension Data in 2014. He completed a three-year term as the CEO of the Victoria Racing Club (VRC) and has been the VRC Chairman since November 2020.

Neil is currently Chairman of Nexon, a non-executive director of ASX-listed Knosys Limited and a member of Advisory Boards for several private technology and digital companies. He continues to be a regular keynote speaker at industry and investor forums and presents to boards and executive committees on digital and technology directions and the value of a data and an information focus.

Following Neil’s appointment by the Board, Peter Clare steps down as Chairman and has resigned as a director, effective 28 February 2023.

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber: “The Dubber team is excited to have Neil Wilson join the Company as Chair. Neil brings with him an expert insight into the sector which will be pivotal to Dubber’s aspirations for digital data transformation.

“We would also like to thank Peter Clare who has been Chair for over 5 years. During his tenure Peter oversaw the transition from a small business into a globally recognized leader in its field. We wish Peter well in pursuit of his many other interests.”

Neil Wilson commented: “Dubber is a great example of a next generation company in the digital and data sector. The local and global opportunities are immense, and I am privileged to be joining the company at this stage of its evolution.”

Mr Wilson has agreed to be remunerated for this role partly in cash and partly in equity. Accordingly, subject to shareholder approval, he will be invited to participate in the Company’s equity incentive scheme and be granted the following securities subject to the Company’s equity incentive scheme rules:

311,084 zero exercise price options; and 600,000 “Remuneration Options” exercisable at $0.50 each on or before 31 July 2027 vesting equally (ie 200,000 options on each occasion) on achievement of share price targets of $0.75, $1.00 and $1.50
(calculated using a rolling 20 day VWAP of Company’s shares traded on ASX).

This announcement has been approved for release to ASX by the Board of Directors.

During 2022, Senior researchers at the Dubber AI Centre of Excellence, worked with leading university groups to co-supervise student projects and internships across Honours, Masters and PhD levels.

“We’re proud to be helping foster emerging talent in speech and language AI in Australia by partnering with local universities.  These connections are a great way for us to keep track of the latest academic advances, while giving students the opportunity to work on problems with practical applications.” Dr Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber

“The School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications is pleased to be partnering with innovative Australian industry partners like Dubber to develop new digital signal processing and machine learning capability. These honours thesis topics jointly supervised by Dubber experts provide invaluable workplace-relevant skill development for UNSW Engineering students, and build industry-university collaboration” Professor Julien Epps, Head of School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW

The projects showcased a range of innovative conversational AI initiatives. As we look forward to welcoming a new cohort in 2023, here is a summary of the projects we enjoyed supporting in 2022:

Darshana Madduma – PhD Internship

University: Professor Sridha Sridharan, QUT.

Title: Evaluation of the Applicability of Audio Transformer Networks for Speaker Diarization.

Darshana investigated how emerging pre-trained general acoustic models can be applied to multiple end tasks, with an initial focus on automatically segmenting speaker turns in conversations.  These models have the promise of increased accuracy while sharing computational resources across different tasks.

Jack Murray – Honours Project

University: Dr Vidhyasaharan Sethu, UNSW

Title: Modern Speech Representation Frameworks for Spoken Language Identification and Segmentation

As speech technologies advance, we face the problem of providing equal access to multilingual speakers, and speakers of less common languages. Some issues with existing systems are that they often support only one language at a time and are usually trained using thousands of hours of labelled data. For less common languages, these large, labelled datasets often don’t exist. Jack’s project implemented a language segmentation algorithm trained on a minimal amount of data by leveraging pre-trained general acoustic models. This could form the basis of a system to segment and transcribe conversations that contain multiple languages.

“It was great having Dubber AI experts supporting my project.  Not only did I learn a lot more than I would have on my own, but it was also really motivating to see practical applications of this type of research”

Jack recently came second (out of around 200 entries) in EE&T’s Thesis Poster Competition, as judged by industry, alumni and academics. Congratulations, Jack!

Pavithra Bharatham Rengarajan – Masters Project

University:Dr Lingqiao Liu, University of Adelaide (AIML)

Title: Unsupervised Dialogue Segmentation with Next Sentence Prediction

Automatic segmentation of a conversation into topics is a key task towards effective presentation or summarisation of meetings.  This is a difficult problem however, and large annotated datasets for this task are not readily available. Pavithra’s project focused on unsupervised techniques that could be used with limited data.  The most promising approach used Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) from the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model to identify the change of context or direction of a conversation transcript.

Madeline Younes – Honours Project

University: Associate Professor Beena Ahmed, UNSW

Title: Exploring Transfer Learning for Arabic Dialect Identification

The goal of Madeline’s project was to automatically distinguish between different spoken Arabic dialects to help improve transcription accuracy.  Given there are scarce data resources for many of these dialects, a novel approach to Dialectal Identification (DID) was investigated by leveraging pre-trained acoustic models.  A multi-stage approach was developed to first classify into one of four umbrella Arabic dialects, and then into a more fine-grained regional DID with seventeen dialects.

Erin Moss – Honours Project

University: Associate Professor Beena Ahmed, UNSW

Title: Domain Specific Sentiment Analysis

Erin’s project investigated how first determining the domain context (topic, or subject matter) could be used to improve training of sentiment classification models for Natural Language Processing.  The system developed included a first statistical model to detect the domain, followed by a second stage where this information was used to select a specialised lexicon on which the sentiment analysis classifier was trained.

We’re helping service providers and organisations unlock the full potential of conversations.Learn more about the Dubber AI Centre of Excellence.

Melbourne, Australia: 31 January 2023 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX:DUB), the leading unified call recording and conversational intelligence platform to global telecommunication service and solution providers, today released its 2Q FY23 Appendix 4C and is pleased to provide this Quarterly Activities Report

2Q FY23 Snapshot

• Operating cash receipts for the quarter were $8.3m (up 48% PcP)
• Cash on hand at 31 December 2022 was $56.7m
• First Foundation contract for Dubber Notes secured with North American Microsoft
  Teams Service Provider, Ziro
• Leading UK service provider Gamma contracts initially for the launch of Dubber
  recording and AI services and migration of existing recording users
• Vodafone expands contract with Dubber services launched into UC and mobile
  networks in Europe, initially with Vodafone UK, and Vodafone Germany
• Virgin Media-02 expands existing contract to wider customer base
• US service provider NTS announces the launch of its Dubber service
• Alianza chooses Dubber as the embedded recording and AI service for its UC
  platform serving as a core network for over 200 Service Providers
• JB Hi-Fi Business contracts as the largest distribution partner for Telstra business
  services
• Ernst & Young Melbourne appointed as the Company’s new auditor

At the end of last year Cavell offered key spokespeople from our industry to step up, discuss and debate the Microsoft roadmap at their London event. If one message stood out above the rest, it’s that the Microsoft Teams growth spurt is far from finished. Teams is a somewhat unexpected high achiever across the board, with 53% of organisations globally choosing it over other collaboration tools. In fact, monthly user numbers for Teams are rumoured to hit an impressive 300 million in Q1 23. With a self-proclaimed focus being put into Microsoft’s relationship with Telephony, it’s an exciting time to be in the Service Provider seat and ride the investment that this juggernaut is pumping into the Mobile landscape.

Digging into Microsoft’s Teams platform development, it seems productivity is still king when it comes to measuring ROI. Empowering organisations with the means to collaborate remotely is critical, with ‘in office’ numbers failing to rise after the pandemic shift (the full-time adoption of hybrid working is now commonplace.) With over 450+ new features released in the past year alone, MS Teams is the obvious choice for companies embracing the modern workplace, and the proof is in the numbers. A cool 33% of organisations swapped to MS Teams from another platform in 2022. So, in the words of Microsoft’s Nick Hedderman, Teams is providing over half the planet with its ‘digital fabric.’ The reason for that seems clear, it’s productivity-centric with a strong development roadmap and a reputation built over decades.

We all want to connect and communicate in our own way- we have our best ideas when we feel relaxed. Microsoft have taken this notion and thrown their energy into Teams Mobile, the next step in creating true flexibility on a collaborative platform. Throughout the day, speakers continued to voice the value of telephony investment, with particular emphasis on Operator Connect. For end users looking to grow and scale their offering, Operator Connect provides the simple UX that customers are looking for- a solution that will unify their organisations’ telephony with certainty. As Marc Burkhard of Swisscom rightly put it: ‘we will become mobile first in the future’. With this in mind, the Operator Connect piece is critical for larger organisations to connect and expand their Teams Mobility in 2023 and beyond.

If Microsoft were clear on their telephony investment, the Service Providers drilled home the need to make those services stand out in a crowded arena. According to Andrew Small of BT: ‘it’s about differentiating the entire end-to-end customer experience.’ This is where revenue boosting platforms like Dubber come in. Adding voice AI and business insights to the Teams offering to improve the day-to-day of both user and manager. Throughout the event, it was obvious that the pressure is on to make the most of the financial investment in 5G and mobile. For Service Providers, differentiators like Dubber who are focused on adding retention, strategic partnership and revenue to the Teams mobile offering are a welcome gift.

If you only took away two learnings from the event it should be these: Microsoft are heavily invested in Telephony, with Teams Mobile set to transform the platform. Tools that create differentiation like Dubber are pivotal to helping SPs increase their Teams adoption and stand out in a competitive landscape.  And secondly, Operator Connect is the gateway to scaling your telephony and improving revenue. Overall, the atmosphere in the room was a united one, the general consensus? ‘We’re better together’.

To dive into the detail around these points, you can check out the full webinar on-demand here.