Orion
Deploying Artificial Intelligence to Support Frontline Teams

Orion is a first-to-market enterprise voice platform comprising a PTT 2.0 collaboration solution together with advanced AI to connect frontline teams and operations across an enterprise. At the foundation of the company’s AI systems is its proprietary audio codec, optimized to deliver high-fidelity data in bandwidth-constrained environments.

Orion’s Voice AI Bots are already supercharging frontline operations, and the company is still in the early days of realizing its full potential.

Following is the conversation that CIO Applications had with Alex McNamara, the Chief Technology Officer of Orion.

Could you tell us more about Orion Voice AI Bots?

Great audio data means pushing a lot of boundaries with voice-driven AI to achieve best-in-class accuracy. This ability unlocks an enormous capacity for improving operational efficiency to grow revenue, better serve customers, and reinforce worker safety.

Orion supplements audio data with metadata such as physical location, time of the day, and query history to dynamically retrieve information and drive decision-making. The company’s voice and location-based Voice AI Bots respond to voice, multimedia, and actions. Voice AI Bots leverage third-party solutions to optimize specific domains and industries, including Google, Microsoft, and IBM Watson.

Orion’s Voice Bots are a radical technological advancement to accelerate innovation and digitally transform operations. They are the critical component of how we bring AI and process automation into Orion’s push-to-talk groups.

The always-on, always-ready Voice Bots perform complex, multi-step workflows to offload routine processes, respond to voice queries, and perform tasks based on commands, events, and actions. Voice commands amplify each worker’s ability to activate third-party integrations by providing real-time value-added language translation and transcription.

Our Voice Bots fall into four categories. Voice Automation Bots take on routine work to enhance frontline teams’ productivity and safety. Emergency Response Bots help frontline teams react faster and more accurately in critical situations. Intelligence Amplification Bots provide team members with real-time intelligence by connecting them with corporate systems and knowledge bases. Value-Added Services Bots integrate with third-party services to provide functionality not typically available to frontline teams, such as language translation and transcription. These four categories of Voice Bots make the frontline workforce more productive and safer.

When customizing the platform for each use case, Orion customers can layer three types of Voice AI Bots: downloadable, standardized Voice AI Bots from the Orion Bot Library, configurable Voice AI Bots that are easily API-connected to any enterprise system, and fully customized Voice AI Bots to any customer-desired workflow.

All messages, voice AI data, and location AI data are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), which is a component built into the very foundation of our platform.

Could you shed some light on the real-world applications of Voice AI Bots?

Businesses with a large frontline or deskless workforce—across transportation, hospitality, retail, and physical security sectors—gain the most value from Orion Voice AI Bots.

Transportation operations use Voice Bots to increase the safety of dispersed drivers who need to communicate with dispatch centers. The Radio Check Voice Bot listens and responds to when drivers say, “Radio Check.” Drivers confirm they are online without requiring a manual response from dispatch. One of our customers used our bots to eliminate all manual radio checks, saving an estimated $700,000 each year.

Hospitality teams, on the other hand, utilize Orion Voice AI Bots to provide an exceptional guest experience. One of the world’s largest hospitality brands came to Orion with a problem: they needed to communicate across hotel rooms, floors, and campuses and enhance the experience. Our Voice AI Bots assist workers with indoor geolocation, voice-activated panic alarms that immediately deploy assistance to a precise location, and language translation, so staff always receives communications in their native language.

Retail employees use Voice AI Bots like Orion’s Price Check Bot and Inventory Query Bot. Employees access knowledge and information on the go and at their point of work in order to serve customers better and be more productive. Voice Bots instantly connect employees with the information they need while staying heads up and engaged with customers. For instance, if a customer needs information about the stock of a particular product, an employee can utilize voice to query backend systems, and Orion’s Inventory Query Bot quickly retrieves the information. Voice Bots also assist retail workers with notifications and next steps related to BOPIS, BOPAC, and same-day delivery.

Security teams use Emergency Alert Voice Bots to enable a new level of incident response. Orion provides instant and accurate location intelligence with always-on, automated panic alarms, man-down alerts, and lone worker safety protocols. Alerts are triggered automatically or manually by commands, events, or actions. Voice-commands like “Code Blue” or “Help-Help-Help” kick-off rapid and targeted responses for any emergency that arises.

We’ve tailored our Voice Bots to meet the common and specific needs of these industries and their frontline workforces. We’ll continue to add more and more Voice Bots so our library will grow and evolve with the needs of our customers.

What are your insights on Orion’s Unified Communications and PTT 2.0 Platform?

Digital transformation for the frontline workforce is impossible without an enterprise-ready Unified Communications (UC) platform connecting deskless workers to teams, organizations, and corporate systems. But most UC platforms fall short of meeting the entire needs of the frontline and mobile workforce. These workers need Unified Communications solutions designed with their unique operational challenges in mind.

That’s why Orion architected our patented PTT 2.0 with Voice AI Bots to supercharge frontline operations. Voice AI Bots are just one of the many ways the PTT 2.0 platform radically transforms frontline operations and unifies enterprise-wide communications. Voice, text, photos, videos, and PDF files create a multimodal experience on one device. Workforces communicate with unmatched coverage over any distance, any network, and any device.

What’s next for Orion’s Voice Platform and Voice AI Bots?

Orion has been awarded over 46 patents protecting its unique voice-first platform architecture, including the innovative Voice AI Bots that truly differentiate our offering from any other PTT or Frontline Unified Communications software.

Striding ahead, we’ll keep building our suite of market-differentiating Voice Bots to support both simple and complex workflows to improve frontline worker productivity and safety.