Areski Belaid, Star2Billing CTO and founder, as well as Newfies-Dialer explains his company's services that can push a business and especially contact center business forward to better organization, customer retention, and communications. His Newfies-Dialer is a Cluecon sponsor, and the voice broadcasting system has some awesome news. Read on!
1. In a few words that would make sense to even my Dad or a newbie to open source development, what does your company do for its clientele?
Star2Billing provides installation services, support, training and development on our freely available open source products that include A2Billing, a telecoms product allowing our customers to provide calling card, VoIP service and sell telephone numbers, also we provide auto-dialer systems used in outbound call centers, and phone surveying for market research and phone polling.
2. What's the latest news of your company?
Our voice broadcasting system, Newfies-Dialer, although not freely available, is being used by companies worldwide in outbound call centers, for market researchers and pollsters, particularly suiting telecoms companies who wish to provide these services to their customers, as Newfies-Dialer is both multi-tenant and can bill customers.
3. How is your company involved in the global open source community?
We contribute at a technical level to the projects that we use in our own products, as well as assist on community mailing lists and forums. We have also released and continue to maintain a long list of free and open source libraries, some for charting, some for text to speech. We try to spin new projects when we see there is a need for something that may be useful for other developers.
4. Does your company use a variety of open source platforms like FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPs, Kamailio and Asterisk and how?
We use Asterisk for A2Billing and in some cases Kamailio as well for scaling up A2Billing installations. FreeSWITCH is used in our premium product, Newfies-DIaler. Our other product, CDR-Stats, supports FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, and Kamailio.
[Pretty well-rounded as if often the case in IP communications industry in regards to open source! One of the companies I work with...DIDX also uses all four. The same can be said for many of the 25K members. This is less about competition and more about what we can all make happen for the better overall. < Suzanne]
5. How can the IP communications industry participate in the opportunities of chatbots & AI?
As a company operating in the call center industry, we are always looking at chatbot and AI. Conversational chatbots are booming recently, and the technology to power a chatbot are now available to us, all thanks to solutions like API.AI and Amazon lex. There is plenty of innovation to be made in the telecommunication industry, but it’s now easy to provide Intelligent interaction on phone calls. The time where we use to press a key on a phone to navigate through a multi-level IVR will soon be a thing of the past...
AI is also becoming a strong player in our industry, for instance companies like Lyrebird are using AI to build text2speech systems that can reproduce anyone's voice using a few minutes of recording, quite scary! AI & Machine learning is key for speech recognition; we will see these technologies getting better, faster and more available to everyone in the coming years. It’s still in the early days, but there are huge opportunities for our industry to create new products and improve existing ones.
6. What are the best social networks, websites, and forums where people can learn from you, collaborate with you and do business with you?
If people want to know more about our auto-dialer product, visit our website and our blog, we actively blog about our latest releases, the tech we use, and the problems we are trying to solve:
https://www.newfies-dialer.org/category/blog/
You can also hear more about Newfies-Dialer on twitter https://twitter.com/newfies_dialer, and for people that want to follow me directly and interact online, you can find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/areskib.
