The enterprise business software giant Salesforce is tossing its hat by calling it quits on their smart voice assistant, Einstein. They launched the Einstein Voice Assistant two years back, and are finally shutting it down. Around a year back, Salesforce opened up a platform that let customers build their own custom voice-assistants.
The official release note from Salesforce goes, “Einstein Voice Assistant is scheduled to be retired on July 10, 2020.” Einstein Voice Assistant is supposed to be discontinued across all Salesforce online platforms, be it iOS or Android.
However, the greater Einstein AI platform is not dying yet — Salesforce confessed that it is going to keep adding features and upgrades, just without the voice assistant existing anymore.
Salesforce encompassed a huge fan base for its voice assistant when they launched the Einstein Voice Assistant. New features and the ways to use the voice assistant made headlines on social media almost regularly.
Last May, Salesforce spent around $45 million to acquire Bonobo, an Israel based startup proficient in voice-conversational AI. The masses presumed that it might have been to enhance Einstein Voice Assistant’s features, but months down the lane, it seems it wasn’t so.
Their commitment towards their voice assistant seemed concrete even till November last year when Salesforce rolled out abilities to help their customers build custom voice apps for Einstein.
The motto was to let business bring in their own personalizations and customizations while keeping the basic code intact. Salesforce was even supposed to build smart-speakers for the Einstein Voice Assistant, which looked like an anime-figurine of Einstein, the famous scientist himself.
It was supposed to have access to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant too. Seeing the hype and timeline, it is quite hard to believe that Salesforce has quietly decided to retire.
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“Voice is a priority for us at Salesforce, and voice capabilities are built into various product and Platform services.
For example, Service Cloud Voice and Einstein Call Coaching are both based on voice technology, and the new Salesforce Anywhere app will also contain voice capabilities.
At this time we’re discontinuing our betas of Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills. Our learnings will continue to inform our new product, the Salesforce Anywhere App.
The app will include voice functionality in a new reimagined way to increase remote productivity, ease of use, and collaboration.”
The brand new Salesforce App has absorbed most of the voice assistant team with wide, welcoming arms. Salesforce Anywhere takes the help of collaborative tools and is built around them.
These tools help in remote work, such as video and text messaging within the Salesforce system. Given the tough situations concerning the global pandemic, its quite natural for Salesforce to refocus their resources to more crucial parts of their system, and rearrange their employees accordingly.
The end of the Einstein Voice Assistant also coincides with the news that Richard Socher, Salesforce’s chief scientist has also left the company to start one of his own after four years of loyal service.
However, reports say that he would still be Salesforce’s advisor in the coming years. He was welcomed to the team due to his exceptional skills in deep learning and natural language processing.
He devoted his skills to boosting and enhancing the Einstein Voice Assistant’s language, translation, and computer vision abilities. We don’t know whether the two incidents are connected or not, however, we can surely say its significant.
Parker Harris, Salesforce’s CTO said, “Einstein Voice will usher in a new era of conversational CRM, delivering new levels of productivity and redefining customer experiences with voice technology,” at the Dreamforce Conference 2018 where they launched the Einstein Voice Assistant for the first time.
According to reports, Salesforce won’t lose out on its partners if it ever decides to make a comeback in the voice assistant industry. It already bagged a partnership with Amazon in the past and has also worked with Apple to create an iOS version of its app.
The iOS version was also controllable by the users with the help of Siri. As major tech giants such as Microsoft and Google are already making huge strides in weaving voice with AI, we won’t be surprised if Salesforce gives the Einstein Voice Assistant another chance.
