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Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (‘Dubber’ or ‘the Company’), the leading global Unified Call Recording & Voice Intelligence cloud platform which provides innovative world leading products directly via Service Provider networks, today released its report on the Company’s operating activities along with the Appendix 4C for the quarter ended 31 March 2022.

Highlights within the Quarter:

• ARR increased by $5.1m QoQ to $55.1m (62% pcp)
• Revenue for 12 months to March 2022 was $33.7m consistent with reported ARR at March 2021
• Revenue increased by $900,000 QoQ to $9.25m (40% pcp)
• Cash receipts increased by $2.9m QoQ to $8.5m
• Net cash outflows decreased by $7.1m
• Dubber subscribers exceed 540,000
• Launch of Notes by Dubber at Mobile World Congress
• Finalised multiple network UCR agreement with TDC Nuuday of Denmark
• Established core infrastructure for acceleration of future growth
• Dubber is fully funded with in excess of $97.5m cash on hand

Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber on Natural Language Processing, speech recognition and how to overcome the issue of bias in this technology

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a specific type of AI technology that allows computers to comprehend text and speech, similarly to how a human would.

The practical implications and benefits of this technology are significant to business success. Now, computers are able to process, analyse and understand a wealth of information, not just from written text sources like libraries or the internet, but also from spoken conversations such as business meetings. With this, for example, organisations can have meetings automatically transcribed, saving a huge amount of time and money.

Some examples of how the application of NLP – specifically in – can help a business succeed are through:Looking specifically at speech-to-text and analysis, there is a number of applications where this type of technology can support businesses.

NLP can analyse the sentiment in customer conversations in real-time, alerting managers to potential conflicts requiring assistance, or suggesting to the operator a different script to follow. It can also gather the most important or impactful topics and themes raised in a meeting and turn them into meeting minutes, including action items.

With the ability to gauge employee engagement in particular projects, the technology can either support staff who are less engaged or offer enablement to those most engaged.

Finally, by determining customer interest levels in different brands, products or services during conversations, businesses can gain market insight through the analysis of speech. Despite these significant benefits, one key issue with this technology is bias. To learn more, we spoke to Iain McCowan, Director of AI at Dubber who shared his insight.

Why are there issues of bias in NLP and speech recognition? How does it occur?

Modern NLP models are trained on large datasets, so ultimately most bias comes from any bias inherent in the dataset. With the USA being the most significant economy, and the place where many recent NLP technologies have been birthed, historically, there have been significantly more language resources for US English than any other language or dialect. This has meant that most speech and language technologies, to this day, still provide the best accuracy and richest features for US English users. Another bias factor that may be present in data is historical bias, in which older training datasets may reflect outdated society stereotypes or biases.

In recent years, the bias from training data has been addressed through two main approaches:

1. Collecting and improving the availability of more varied and up to date language datasets. An example of this is the Common Voice project by Mozilla.
2. Focusing research on methods that improve performance for low resource languages, such as so-called self-supervised learning to pre-train NLP models that can be used for a range of end tasks without needing large annotated datasets. This makes it easier to learn models for less common languages where there aren’t many available large annotated datasets. One example is XLM-R.

These approaches can be used to address not just language diversity, but also to reduce bias against any under-represented population.

How does bias manifest itself in speech recognition software? What are the implications?

Bias can occur in speech recognition and NLP within a business in multiple ways, due to natural variations in speech and language usage that arise from factors such as personality, occupation, education, age, gender, etc.

Fundamentally, the most glaring bias issue in current systems is when speech-to-text recognition software simply misunderstands the speaker, and the incorrect words are noted down – or missed completely. For all intents and purposes, if we are trying to do processing and analysis of the spoken word, this speaker has no voice.

There are many reasons that misunderstanding of a speaker can occur:

• If the is multi-language and the business lacks the same breadth of languages in speech recognition systems and NLP models. With 7000+ languages across the globe, to be equitable to all employees, clients, partners, and customers, a business must ensure their NLP solutions provide equitable coverage of all languages spoken within and across the bounds of their organisation.
• Regionally, there are different dialects and accents that are unique, from US to UK English, Spanish as a second language speakers, African-American Vernacular English, and even differences between states in Australia. The models used must accommodate for all these to accurately understand what was said by all speakers.
• Different gendered speakers, and also children and elderly speakers may also sound different, so models must include these.
• Speakers with speech impairments can be misunderstood, so models must be trained to accommodate these people.

What is needed to overcome and regulate bias in NLP technology?

For NLP technology providers, there is a need to improve the diversity in underlying training data, as well as increase research into methods to improve performance for low resource scenarios, such as under-represented languages, dialects, ages or genders.

Businesses that are clients of NLP technology can influence this by insisting performance reporting is done across a range of these demographic factors and by selecting NLP technology vendors based on their accuracy across the board.

To reduce bias for their employees and customers, businesses should implement continual monitoring of NLP accuracy to ensure they are always using the best set of NLP technologies to suit their circumstances. This is not just a one-time decision – continual monitoring is required.  For instance, the software can be used to alert on circumstances where a particular speaker is not making sense in the speech-to-text – a bias is occurring. By evaluating the speaker carefully, they can then seek to implement new models to accommodate them – and other people like them.  A simple way this is often achieved in speech recognition is for employees to read a script during onboarding so that the technology can better learn their individual voices.

Another recent approach to effectively addressing bias is through NLP systems that incorporate active learning loops. This active learning approach allows companies, teams or individual users to provide positive or negative feedback on NLP outputs that allow the models to then adaptively improve for their specific usage over time. This can mean each individual can control and improve the accuracy of systems for their own usage, giving them the power to eliminate negative bias.

By building in activities and automation that help remove bias in NLP systems, businesses can ensure they are engaging ethically with all speakers, allowing everyone to be truly heard. Sharing voice data sets publicly, stripped of proprietary information, can also help evolve language models to be more inclusive.

This article originally appeared in AI Magazine.

• Nuuday is Denmark’s largest telecommunications service provider
• Nuuday to deploy Dubber recording and AI for mobile and Unified Communications (UC)
• Nuuday to migrate existing recording users to Dubber platform
• Builds Dubber footprint across Nordics
• Service launching in Dubber Q4 FY2022

Melbourne, Australia – 23 March 2022 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (Dubber) is pleased to announce that its Unified Call Recording (UCR) and Voice AI platform has been selected by Denmark’s Nuuday for unified call recording and voice AI for mobile and unified communications (UC) customers.

Nuuday is Denmark’s largest telecommunications service provider, part of the national carrier TDC Group/ TDC Holding A/S. Dubber services will be available for TDC Erhvervs (a Nuuday brand) customers on their mobile and Unified Communications (UC) solutions in the first half of 2022. The deployment will also provide for the migration of all existing on-premise call recordings to the Dubber cloud platform, maintaining or exceeding compliance standards under legacy customer agreements.

Dubber UCR services will also be immediately available on TDC Scale, Nuuday’s Unified Communications solution for enterprise customers, while migrating existing recording services, and call recording data to the Dubber platform. This implementation will enable Nuuday customers to seamlessly add Dubber products to their existing Nuuday UC services while allowing for the rollout of additional Dubber solutions onto the TDC Scale service.

John Henriksen, CEO, TDC Erhverv: “Our new partnership with Dubber will provide a scalable and secure solution to meet our customers’ call recording requirements, across their mobile and Unified Communications services. Dubber’s solutions will easily integrate with our existing infrastructure and service offerings for all Danish businesses, reinforcing our ambition to constantly innovate to meet customers’ needs. With UC transforming the way businesses communicate, solutions like Dubber provide much-needed, secure and compliant functionality.”

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber: Nuuday is a recognised industry leader and one of the most progressive carriers in the European unified communications sector, with one of the largest customer bases on its Cisco/Broadworks UC network. We are delighted to be upgrading Nuuday’s existing recording installed base to the Dubber platform. These legacy services will now have all the inherent benefits of Dubber’s cloud platform, including fully compliant storage, search, transcription, and sentiment analysis – providing Dubber with an accretive increase to our ARR. Provisioning of the Dubber Platform across a broad addressable market will also enable Nuuday to utilise AI to transform data into valuable insights, driving revenue, retention, and differentiation. In addition, Dubber’s cloud-native, simple-to-deploy call recording platform provides Nuuday with an infinitely scalable solution that will grow as their customer needs grow.”

“Our agreement with Nuuday is another important milestone in establishing Dubber as the defacto call recording and conversational AI service for a telecommunications service provider. Through our innovative technology and partnering approach, we can deliver scale, carrier-grade performance and integration in the cloud, and the partnering model to enhance revenue for our service provider customers significantly,” added McGovern.

The Nuuday agreement will provide an accretive revenue stream for Dubber, with additional revenues determined by uptake of the services by Nuuday customers. This ASX announcement has been approved for release to ASX by Steve McGovern, CEO & Managing Director.

As companies are announcing their return-to-office policies, it appears that the trend heavily leans toward the hybrid model. After two years of people working remotely, the hybrid model—understandably—seems like a practical way to ease into commuting and working in an office setting.

Solving compliance on Microsoft Teams

Businesses need to record their Microsoft Teams calls for various compliance reasons: including limiting liability, resolving disputes, and providing evidence of advice given, transactions, and trades.

Using Teams, shouldn’t mean compromising the compliance standards you set out to achieve or investing in more capital expenditure. The need for a unified and cost-effective approach to communication capture has never been more urgent.

What you’ll find inside

This guide will show how to create a secure, compliant and scalable system of record for every conversation – across Microsoft Teams and other communication channels in your business.

Learn

• Why compliance call recording is essential for Microsoft Team
• Why on-premise and hosted recording solutions aren’t viable post-COVID
• The 15 most important factors in choosing the right call recording solution for your needs

Are you ready for what comes next?

Download the whitepaper by leading telecommunications industry analyst firm Cavell Group, to discover the key trends impacting service providers and what every service provider needs to do next.

See What’s Inside

2022 will see the next major shifts in the global communications landscape. From a reassessment of the solutions deployed in the first wave of the pandemic through to the continued and rapid evolution business models to grow revenue, improve operating performance, and drive retention and differentiation.

This paper seeks to highlight key trends and potential paths forward for service providers.

Learn about:

• The key telecommunications industry trends including new and emerging competitors
• New ways to create value using a multipronged approach
• Emerging user trends driving new strategy such as fragmentation of communication

“Successful service providers will be driven by addressing short-term opportunities to seize untapped growth with a holistic approach to transformation.”

Barcelona, Spain (Mobile World Congress) and Melbourne, Australia – 2 March 2022 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (Dubber) today launched the results of a commissioned research study by Cavell Group, identifying the top trends service providers globally will be focusing on in 2022.

Throughout all the trends identified in the Cavell report, the lasting impact of the global pandemic on service providers and their business operations are clear.  During the first wave of the pandemic, enterprises and carriers sought to rapidly deploy solutions to support remote access and business continuity.  Now, these efforts are being superseded by a second imperative as enterprises seek to improve “band-aid” responses and address a more permanent state of hybrid working.  In almost all areas of their business, service providers will continue to adapt to the dramatic changes in the workforce behaviour patterns that emerged in the global pandemic and will continue into 2022.

Major Trends Identified in the Report Include:

• The rapid rise of unified communications and a proliferation of communications channels have shifted the strategic planning of every service provider, increasing the pressure to create new sources of revenue and buttress margins, and to drive differentiation and retention
• Communication and collaboration solutions will continue to try and recreate in-person experiences. Distributed video, Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS), Contact Centre as a Service, and CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) services will continue to be in high demand.
• Competition with hyper-scalers and OTT providers will intensify in 2022
• Compliance, security, governance, ransomware and risk mitigation solutions will drive a new wave of demand from enterprises as they look for ways to “tighten up” across all major infrastructure, including communications.  Agile service providers and managed service providers will look to meet these requirements with new and differentiated service offerings
• Extracting additional value from service provider data, voice data, and other analytics services will provide service providers opportunities to differentiate their service offerings

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber: “As service providers move into 2022 and transition beyond the severe impacts of Covid-19, a set of new trends are poised to reshape the service provider landscape again. Dubber believes that 2022 will be a pivotal year for the global service provider industry as carriers seek to grow and adapt to the changes brought on by the mass distribution of workforces of the last two years.  While the roll out of 5G services will continue to grab headlines in many countries, even bigger threats and opportunities exist that will remake what we view the traditional role of a service provider to be.  We are very optimistic that strong growth opportunities will be available for Dubber and our service provider partners as we drive voice data and new value-added services that will improve business outcomes for our joint customers in the year ahead.”

Matthew Townend, Executive Director, Cavell Group: “The first wave of the global pandemic rapidly accelerated unified communications and mobile, changing the service provider landscape materially. The second wave will not be the same, with enterprises looking to bolster solutions deployed in the first with greater security and compliance; adapt to hybrid working as a permanent way of working; and secure greater intelligence and compliance from content. AI and automation based on conversational data are new frontiers for service providers and represent a significant opportunity to improve revenue, differentiation and retention.”

Resources:

• Cavell Report
• Link to Dubber Blog

About Dubber:

Dubber is unlocking the potential of voice data from any call or conversation. Dubber is the world’s most scalable Unified Call Recording service and Voice Intelligence Cloud adopted as core network infrastructure by multiple global leading telecommunications carriers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Dubber allows service providers to offer conversational recording from virtually any source – turning them into AI-enriched insights for compliance, revenue, customer and people intelligence. Dubber is a disruptive innovator in the multi-billion-dollar call recording industry. Its Software as a Service offering removes the need for on-premise hardware, applications or costly and limited storage.

About Cavell Group:

Cavell Group is an EMEA-focused research, consulting, engineering and education services business with offices in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and remote associates worldwide. Known as a leading provider of insight into the cloud communications and managed services markets, a key source of market intelligence for service providers, vendors and potential investors, Cavell Group was formed nearly 20 years ago, by a team of senior executives, who had been instrumental in building the early internet market both at UUNET and Level 3. Since 2003, the firm has delivered consulting services, research, due diligence and professional services solutions in over 50 countries worldwide. Cavell has built a strong reputation as leading analysts of the cloud communications market, providing strategic consulting and research in EMEA and the USA to service providers, vendors, manufacturers and private equity firms.

European/Mobile World Congress Media
Annabel Clementson
annabel@wearetfd.com
+44 7951 786435

A/NZ Investors
Simon Hinsley
simon.hinsley@dubber.net
+61 (0) 401 809 653

A/NZ Media
Terry Alberstein
terry@navigatecommunication.com.au
+61 (0) 458 484 921

Dubber and AT&Ts “The Future of Work” study highlighted that while many firms had responded to a shift in working models as needed, this had largely resulted in “band-aid” solutions to enabling hybrid work, with the majority lacking a detailed strategy to support it.

The resulting length of time working remotely is now driving a cultural and technology reset in business – to which AI and ML will be critical in delivering advanced functionality to drive innovation and collaboration.

1. Hybrid work the default by 2024: Half of work performed offsite: 81% believe hybrid work will be the foremost working model by 2024, with 56% of work done offsite.
2. Oversight of employees challenged: C-level executives ranked employee oversight, losing institutional/tribal knowledge and sustaining culture as the primary challenges.
3. Clear gap between C-suite and operational executives: Operational executives ranked onboarding, the lack of a comprehensive strategy, and technological debt as more significant than C-level executives.
4. Tension between what employees want and what organizations prefer: 86% believe their employees prefer a hybrid work model but 64% believe their organization prefers an on-premise work model.
5. Hybrid working strategy and policies are critical to talent attraction: 100% believe a hybrid work model will help attract young talent. 97% believe a hybrid work model will help attract new talent.
6. Hybrid work to advance diversity: 91% believe a hybrid work model will improve workforce diversity.
7. Cultural shift required: 58% believe they don’t have the culture to sustain a hybrid work model.
8. Hybrid working is impacting innovation and collaboration: Hybrid working seen as effective in driving productivity – 79% but not supporting innovation – 45% and impacting collaboration – 54%.
9. Conversational AI will make a difference: 71% believe that AI and ML in conversational help will have an important business impact.
10. AI & ML in conversational insights is transforming work: With the tech having a high impact on Employee Productivity, Customer Intelligence, Attracting New Talent, Revenue Leakage, Call Center Intelligence, and Retaining Talent.

DALLAS and Melbourne, Australia – March 1, 2022 — AT&T* and Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (Dubber) today announced the results of primary market research gauging executive and employee attitudes to COVID-driven hybrid working.

The State of the Industry: Future of Work survey was created to gain insights from senior executives regarding current and future work models, challenges posed under new working models, and technology accelerants to aid change in the way that businesses conduct work out to 2024.

The research shows hybrid work – a mixture of onsite and remote work – will become the standard operating model across industries by 2024. Striking results included:

• Hybrid work the default by 2024, half of work performed offsite: 81% believe hybrid work will be the foremost working model by 2024, with 56% of work done offsite
• Vast majority of businesses lack a detailed hybrid work strategy: 72% lack a detailed strategy and 76% don’t have the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to support hybrid working models
• Tension between what employees want and what organizations prefer: 86% believe their employees prefer a hybrid work model but 64% believe their organization prefers an on-premise work model
• 100% of respondents believe a hybrid work model will help attract young talent

2021 was identified as a redefining year in how companies conducted business with just 24% of respondents’ employees working onsite. Before COVID-19, these non-traditional work models were more likely to be viewed as employee perks.

Lack of workplace innovation, insufficient oversight, and cultural shifts were identified as three barriers to successful hybrid work, but participants believed they were not insurmountable. With investment in strategy, building culture remotely, and the application of technology – specifically AI – in critical business use-cases, firms can transition to a successful hybrid-first work environment.

The top challenges to effective hybrid work identified by CXOs include: maintaining employee oversight, losing institutional/tribal knowledge, and sustaining company culture – all traditionally highly associated with in-person work. Mass adoption of new work models has shown to be partially effective, with 79% of firms believing that employees have been productive, although not without resulting challenges, with only 45% confident in employee innovation throughout the period.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) were identified as the top transformative technologies in the survey, with their intrinsic value identified specifically in the areas of employee training, intelligent enterprise search and learning, and conversational help.

The research shows that while employee productivity is maturing, with high analytics adoption, other areas like revenue leakage and employee retention require further investment. A need for deeper analytics and insights – driven by AI – into both the customer and employee can be accomplished by mining and transforming data from remote conversations and interactions – to build new models of operation in targeted business functions.

Alicia Dietsch, Senior Vice President, AT&T Business Marketing: “There’s been a non-reversible shift in the way business is done thanks to the constraints of COVID-19. It’s clear that a successful talent program now requires a hybrid work policy, but that policy needs to be supported by a strategic tech-first cultural reset, to ensure business growth and competition. Firms need to ask themselves if they have the in-house expertise to achieve this, or whether it’s now time to go beyond a partner in remote infrastructure rollout to a partner in tech-first remote business strategy.”

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber: “We’ve taken the first steps into a ‘work from anywhere’ world. Removing employees from the workplace was necessary but creating distance wasn’t.”

“Our technology is served directly from AT&T’s networks as part of an AT&T service enabling organizations to capture every conversation and turn them into data and seamlessly share insights as desired. Knowing and understanding how employees are performing and, indeed, their general welfare can have significant impacts on how businesses manage this hybrid workplace environment. This can be achieved via immediate customer insight including, for example, real-time sentiment analytics. AI makes it possible to mine this vast treasure trove of information.”

“Businesses moved with urgency to distance employees. Now they need to do the same when it comes to deploying the tools needed to overcome distance. Closing the gap between a business and their customers and employees should be a priority for every executive and, it’s available directly from the AT&T service.”

Gaurav Pant, Co-Founder/Chief Insights Officer, Incisiv: “COVID-19 has been the single most transformative event in shaping the future of work. Attitudes towards working models have dramatically transformed over the last 24 months, and the “hybrid” working model will soon become default. Firms needs to upgrade their employee technology stack and undergo a cultural reset to prepare for this new normal.”

Research Highlights & Background: Hybrid Work = The New Way to Work

The Future of Work study highlighted that while many firms responded to a shift in working models as needed, this largely resulted in “band-aid” solutions to enabling hybrid work, with the majority lacking a detailed strategy to support it. The resulting length of time working remotely is now driving a cultural and technology reset in business – to which AI and ML will be critical in delivering advanced functionality to drive innovation and collaboration.

Additional research highlights include:

• Hybrid work to advance diversity: 91% believe a hybrid work model will improve workforce diversity.
• Cultural shift required: 58% believe they don’t have the culture to sustain a hybrid work model.
• Hybrid working is impacting innovation and collaboration: 79% believe hybrid working is effective in driving productivity, but 45% feel it does not support innovation and 54% see it impacting collaboration.
• Conversational help: 71% believe that AI and ML in conversational help will have an important business impact.
• AI & ML in conversational insights is transforming work: With the tech having a high impact on Employee Productivity, Customer Intelligence, Attracting New Talent, Revenue Leakage, Call Center Intelligence, and Retaining Talent.

The Future of Work study from Incisiv was conducted on behalf of AT&T and Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (Dubber), between October 2021 – November 2021. The survey comprised 303 US-based respondents, 87% above Director level, across five key industries, with 1M+ employees represented, and 34% with companies over $1B in revenue.

About AT&T Communications

We help family, friends and neighbors connect in meaningful ways every day. From the first phone call 140+ years ago to mobile video streaming, we @ATT innovate to improve lives. AT&T Communications is part of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T). For more information, please visit us at att.com.

About Dubber

Dubber is unlocking the potential of voice data from any call or conversation directly from the network. Dubber is the world’s most scalable Unified Call Recording service and Voice Intelligence Cloud adopted as core network infrastructure by multiple global leading telecommunications carriers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Dubber allows service providers to offer recording from virtually any source – turning them into AI-enriched insights for compliance, revenue, customer and people intelligence. Dubber is a disruptive innovator in the multi-billion-dollar call recording industry. Its Software as a Service offering removes the need for on-premise hardware, applications or costly and limited storage.

For more information, please contact:

For AT&T:
Andrea Huguely
+1 (972) 207-8630
Andrea.Huguely@att.com

For Dubber:

Investors
Simon Hinsley
simon.hinsley@dubber.net
+61 (0) 401 809 653

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