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IN MEMORIAM IN MEMORY OF TOM TWOHEY Thomas Twohey, AIA, architect and founding principal of KCCT , passed away on July 31 after a brief illness. A graduate of the University of California Berkley where he studied architecture, Twohey went on to a successful career in the offices of Rex Allen, Hugh Stubbins, and Harry Weese. As KCCT principal for business operations he helped the firm grow from a Washington, D.C., startup of seven to a staff of 70. With more than 55

years of professional experience, Twohey managed major domestic historic building renovations including the National Building Museum Modernization and the New Facades for the Ariel Rios Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Twohey was also a founding director of KCCT International, a sister company specializing in large international planning projects and urban mass transit systems.

The company’s urban transportation projects include work in London, Seoul, Pusan, Taipei, Kaohsiung, Bangkok, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Baghdad. After his retirement in 2013, Twohey continued his travels and took great pride in showing the world to his grandchildren. KCCT is a multi-disciplinary design firm focused on planning, architecture, and interior design in urban environments.

H. JOHN OECHSLE, from page 9

to 15 months, this technology is expected to become much more sophisticated within the next year-and-a-half. It’s mind blowing to think about how sophisticated CRM- related artificial intelligence will become. In July, an Israeli startup called Gong received $20 million in funding to develop a tool that uses “natural language processing and machine learning to help train and suggest information to salespeople and customer service representatives.” How incredible is that? Mainstreaming of such technology will allow small and midsized businesses to take advantage of the processing power that industry behemoths such as Amazon and IBM are investing into. If you can believe it, the speech recognition market is expected to reach nearly $10 billion by 2022. It all translates into tremendous value for small and midsized businesses. Taking advantage of technological advances as they become available allows smaller organizations to adapt faster within their CRM plans, benefit from huge productivity gains, and experiment with less risk. Soon, CRM users will be able to interact with email, set up activities, and even receive recommendations on the next best customer interaction to initiate. They’ll accomplish all this by simply verbalizing a sentence or two. Keyboards aren’t going anywhere – yet. But CRM voice activation is coming fast, and finding ways to have your small business take advantage of this new technology to drive better, more meaningful customer interactions can have a real impact on your bottom line and organizational growth. So, drink a nice cup of tea with honey because you may need those pipes at the office tomorrow! H. JOHN OECHSLE serves as president and CEO of Swiftpage. Oechsle has a track record of building highly profitable and sustainable revenue growth for emerging companies and established global leaders. Contact him at joechsle@swiftpage.com. “CRM voice activation is coming fast, and finding ways to have your small business take advantage of this new technology to drive better, more meaningful customer interactions can have a real impact on your bottom line and organizational growth.”

Speech-to-text software can be a real time-saver for data entry, too. Rather than the costly and monotonous task of manually inputting data, users can rely on software to submit information via speech. This saves hours. The average worker types 50-70 words per minute. Meanwhile, speech recognition programs can accommodate 120-140 words per minute with near-perfect accuracy. And if you’re serious about saving time, forget texting. A Stanford study found speech recognition to be three times faster than typing on a phone. “Speech-to-text software can be a real time-saver for data entry, too. Rather than the costly and monotonous task of manually inputting data, users can rely on software to submit information via speech. This saves hours.” ALEXA, HELP ME ADAPT. As I mentioned, many people are al- ready using voice activation in their day-to-day lives. Ac- cording to a recent study, nearly 40 percent of smartphone owners use voice recognition software. Naturally, small and midsized business owners and employees will want to use voice activation in their professional lives, too. And smaller organizations are often better positioned to test and integrate new technologies on the fly than enterprise-level companies that come with much longer approval, research, and implementation processes. Early stage voice-activated CRMs will consist of a basic integration with well-established virtual assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod. Users can ease into this advancing technology by mastering the basic skills and continuing to learn as voice activation becomes more sophisticated. As businesses begin relying more heavily on voice activation, they’ll find there’s no longer a need to bring up a full-blown CRM. Instead, they’ll rely on spoken words to complete a task. ALEXA, WHAT’S NEXT? The greatest advantages of voice-acti- vated CRM technology are still to come. Though base level interaction tools will continue to pop up over the next 12

THE ZWEIG LETTER October 23, 2017, ISSUE 1221

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