SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 25, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orion Labs, the fast-growing voice platform for teams in business, enterprise, and government organizations, today unveils Orion App Talk, a new talk button feature that turns the Orion mobile application into a walkie-talkie app. This enables users of Onyx and subscribers of Orion Pro to roll out push-to-talk communication and efficiency-enhancing voice-based automations across more of their workforce. This functionality is available today for iOS and will soon be accessible to Android users as well.
Validating this move are the results of Orion Labs first annual “Voice in the Workplace Report”, released today. Conducted in collaboration with CMG Partners, the study surveyed over 900 business owners and employees across industries such as hospitality, manufacturing and retail on their sentiments towards legacy and new voice-powered communication platforms.
The results demonstrate the enormous scale of workplace communication, with nearly two-thirds of respondents communicating with six or more coworkers daily. On average, workers were found to use 4.5 different communications tools or methods to reach an increasingly diffuse workforce, with 75 percent of respondents spending at least some of their time as deskless workers. These results drove Orion Labs to offer App Talk alongside its award-winning wearable smart walkie-talkie, Onyx, to offer today’s workers more flexible and efficient ways to communicate with their teams.
“App Talk enables a new means of communication via our Orion platform, expanding the use cases for business users in a variety of industries and roles,” says Orion Labs CEO and Co-Founder Jesse Robbins. “To use Orion, organizations can now mix-and-match with the devices that work best for their staff, depending on individual requirements. Being able to choose voice communication tools based on how employees work and communicate delivers improved team communications.”
“The beauty of voice as the user interface is that the technology comes out when it is needed and remains invisible when it is not – key hallmarks of when technology is at its best,” said Ramon Llamas, Research Manager, IDC. “Users should not be distracted with operating the device, but instead remain focused on the message and its delivery. And at the end of the day, that’s what users – both consumers and enterprise users – want.”
Employees such as front desk staff at hotels, medical offices and schools who use computers, tablets or mobile devices in their everyday work, can use App Talk to coordinate with colleagues, eliminating the need to toggle between tools and risk missing vital information. At the same time, deskless workers, such as drivers, retail staff, field technicians and engineers, who require situational awareness, work with gloves and cannot look at their screens for safety reasons, or during customer interactions, will continue to benefit from Orion’s award-winning wearable walkie-talkie Onyx to talk with their teams in real time, keeping them heads-up and distraction-free.
App Talk also provides another option for Orion customers to talk to bots and access other productivity-enhancing voice features. These bots and features help people do more with voice, including using voice search with internal and external systems, voice commands to trigger business processes and more. Examples include:
- Orion Translator – enabling instant speech translation in up to 67 languages, the most popular being Spanish.
- Retail Bot – letting workers check inventory and request deliveries with voice commands.
- Panic Bot – empowering lone workers or people dealing with a workplace accident to use voice to initiate emergency processes.
- IFTTT – customers can integrate Orion with Google Assistant and Alexa, smart home devices and other productivity apps, further expanding what they can accomplish by voice.
To use App Talk, Orion customers must upgrade their Orion iOS app to version 5.1.3. For a full summary of Orion Labs’ “Voice in the Workplace” report and what these trends mean for voice technology, please download the report here: http://bit.ly/2Fc4VGZ
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About Orion Labs
Orion Labs is transforming the way people and teams communicate using the power of their voice and has been recognized as Hot Vendor by Aragon Research. Orion’s award-winning platform delivers secure, real-time voice communication across a constellation of connected devices, applications, and services. Orion gives mobile teams a heads-up, eyes-free experience that enables them to communicate without losing focus, across any distance, anywhere in the world. In 2018, Orion Labs’ Onyx received the “IoT Wearables Innovation Vendor of the Year" Award from IoT Breakthrough.
The company was founded by cloud infrastructure pioneers Jesse Robbins and Greg Albrecht who were inspired by their experiences using traditional radios as firefighters and EMTs. Orion Labs is backed by leading investors and is based in San Francisco, CA.
For more information, please contact:
Daniella Kohan
orionlabsUS@hotwirepr.com
646-790-4736
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/586ede02-a571-4664-8c0a-16f81840b247