Business communications-as-a-service provider Dialpad Inc. has revamped its voice-over-internet-protocol-based UberConference videoconferencing product.

The new Dialpad Meetings product announced today adds new features and is meant to serve as a unified communications platform for companies that helps to simplify business collaboration and eliminate the growing phenomenon of “app overload.”

Dialpad Meetings is based on the same underlying technology that powered its UberConference videoconferencing platform. It has been natively integrated with the wider Dialpad app that also includes business telephony and messaging platforms.

The app provides a slick interface from where users can find, message and call their contacts and co-workers, similar to something like Slack. Users can start or join Dialpad Meetings directly from any direct message, group message or channel within the app.

The offering has a bunch of new features too. There’s an artificial intelligence flavor to the new Real-Time Voice Intelligence capability, which can be used for live note-taking and automated transcriptions and analysis. That, the company said, helps users to stay focused on the actual meetings. The company has also added more emoji reactions and expressions that can be used to “provide feedback in real-time without interruptions.”

One of the things that has always set Dialpad apart is its ability to handle video calls with people who aren’t using the Dialpad platform. Adding to this capability, Dialpad said users can now share their screens during a phone call to anyone, including people that don’t use the Dialpad platform. This enables easier collaboration, for example with someone from outside the user’s organizations, as well as things such as virtual walkthroughs or demonstrations, the company said.

Another new feature the company was at pains to point out today, including it in a separate press release, is Dialpad Channels. This appears to be very similar to the Channels feature found in Slack, with separate chat rooms for each project or task someone is working on or involved with. But Dialpad said its Channels feature is superior thanks to its always-on, voice-only meeting room function, which enables quick impromptu meetings within a traditional messaging platform.

“Dialpad is the only company to offer audio functionality within topic-based channels for both UCaaS and CCaaS,” Dialpad co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Brian Peterson told SiliconANGLE. “Channels is part of our complete communication platform, and with the integration of Meetings now within Dialpad, we are one of the only providers to offer all of these business communication methods in a single app with common data and system architecture. These features are available in GA for customers starting today.”

Dialpad Channels also provides full chat functionality with a quick and easy way for users to share files and documents they’re working on, for example, as well as a powerful search tool that helps users locate forgotten action items within a long chat history.

“External and internal communication tools are becoming more multimodal,” said analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “It is good to see more multichannel offerings coming to the market, and now it is Dialpad’s turn to try to change what the future of work will look like going forward with its multimodal and multichannel communications platform.”

The Dialpad Channels feature is available within Dialpad Meetings, which in turn is available via the Dialpad app, providing connectivity to users in 49 countries from today, the company said.

Image: Dialpad