<p>I've been a healthy skeptic of UC for a number of years, having been prejudiced by the Nortel/Microsoft effort to promote the concept and then watched as numerous IP PBX and "cloud" players evolve themselves into UC companies. The truth is more complex, since voice continues to be a silo for the majority of the market.</p><p>Consider any typical UC offering being promoted today. You get email, IM, presence, telephony, messaging, video as the core applications, with voice sitting neatly in its own little package with voice mail and visual voice mail (speech-to-text via email) complementing stock phone functions such as call forwarding, caller ID, and simultaneous ring. I'd be more impressed if you got an IM with caller ID information cross referenced with any address book information when you had inbound calls set to "off," but so-called state of the art is getting a voice mail/visual voice mail notification with just the inbound phone number and time stamp on the subject header.</p><p>The level of processing intelligence used on any sort of inbound voice -- either live or recorded --just isn't there. Tools such as speech-to-text, Hypervoice and voice analytics are not common, with most uses limited to large call centers.</p><p>Call recording and voice mail are two separate applications -- why? Both applications record voice, with the latter just having one party on the line. Shouldn't you have one "unified" call recording application?</p><p><a href="http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2013/12/16/363802-smart-voice-not-todays-unified-communications.htm">Keep reading...</a></p>