Virtual assistant for Skype

Intervate has released ROBIT, a locally-developed virtual personal assistant (VPA), enabling organisations to extract more value from Microsoft’s recently launched Skype for Business.

Skype for Business, recently re-branded from the previous name of Microsoft Lync, facilitates instant messaging and live online meetings for multiple colleagues within a company – via video, audio, or text-based chat.

ROBIT leverages the Skype for Business platform to act as a company-wide virtual personal assistant for all employees within an organisation.

These could range from simple tasks like booking meeting rooms or resetting account passwords, to more complex queries that dive into line-of-business systems – such as one’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.

Using the text chat feature of Skype for Business, interactions are as quick and simple as any other form of instant messaging (like WhatsApp for example).

Best of all, ROBIT has a quirky and sometimes irreverent personality. She can serve up jokes on request; or reply with cheeky responses like “we don’t have any meeting rooms with a time machine”, if one accidently tries to book a meeting room for a date that’s already passed.

These light-hearted aspects help bring a human-like touch to each interaction, making it fun to engage with ROBIT. It assists in taking the drudgery out of trawling through complex line-of-business systems, which often have less-friendly user interfaces or require additional user access licences.

ROBIT can be customised within any environment, and taught to learn how to perform specific tasks. So, the next time a staff member has the same request, ROBIT is able to deal with the query.

Bruce Williams, ROBIT Product Manager at Intervate, emphasises the importance of this innovation: “Organisations are increasingly looking to automation as a way of becoming more agile and responsive to their customers. ROBIT is an easy-to-use business process tool – designed to speed up many of the simple operational tasks that can consume much of one’s day.”

“She’s always available, always replies instantly, and always provides accurate responses to any queries”.

With fairly straightforward integration, ROBIT is able to draw information from any form of line of business system. Most commonly, information sourced by ROBIT is housed in one’s ERP, CRM and Intranet environments, but it can be plugged into any system.

Williams explains that ROBIT is another illustration of the close partnership between Microsoft and Intervate. As a multi-award winning partner over the past few years (most-recently, Intervate was named South Africa’s Microsoft Partner of the Year for 2015), the two companies have enjoyed a long-standing relationship in Africa.

“From our origins of deploying Microsoft SharePoint to delivering content management services to local clients, we’re now evolving into other areas – like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Azure, Skype for Business and the Internet of Things.”

Intervate will be extending a free one year ROBIT license to all existing clients.