First of all, let’s be clear about the name. Our Threads Intelligent Message Hub has nothing to do with Meta. We trademarked the “Threads” name in 2012 to describe our Intelligent Message Hub service and were granted UK, European and US patents on the Threads technology described in our landmark 2016 IET paper “Untangling your Threads – a novel cloud computing application. OK, so now you are clear about the name, let’s explain what it is and why it is different from almost any other SaaS product.
Threads’ primary purpose is to aggregate all of a company’s digital messages, for example emails and VoIP phone calls, in a single Cloud-based database. Why would a company want to do that? Well, here are just 3 reasons..
- Most emails are locked away in private accounts which can only be accessed by the employees that are addressed in the email.
- Generally, phone calls cannot easily be replayed, let alone searched for key words – locating a specific phone call and replaying it is next to impossible.
- Viewing communications with outside parties in the context of all the people involved gives an entirely different perspective on the relationship between the parties.
As soon as all of an organisation’s digital messages are stored together, they become a massive untapped source of information about the organisation. A source of information that is private to the organisation and not available to any search engine or AI service, yet vital to the efficiency of the organisation’s employees. This idea of treating internal data as a type of large language model (LLM), and then implementing AI to search your data, is gaining traction and not just among large enterprise-level businesses.
Threads goes beyond simply recording and transcribing calls although this part is still important – we focus on accurate translation of audio into text by picking up each speaker’s voice at the highest fidelity. This is essential if phone calls are to be searched and sorted, just like emails.
The process of call transcription is just a small part of the Threads functionality – so don’t think that Threads is just another call transcription system although you can try that part if you want.
To make the calls of real practical use, they need to be ingested automatically from the telephone system and the transcriptions delivered to the appropriate person in the form required. This means they must be indexed and stored in a robust, scalable and secure Cloud-based database. The patented design of the Threads database is crucial to providing user privacy and access to messages for as long as the subscriber requires. In many systems, call transcription is manually instigated and calls are stored with little regard for ease of future access. To our knowledge, Threads is the only service that automatically unifies phone calls with other types of digital message such as emails, making ease-of-access the number one priority.
Operational ease-of-access and technical excellence are one thing. Simple practical administration and pricing is another. Threads recognises that expensive and complicated licencing schemes can be the death of many good services. This is particularly true of message handling systems where there may be many staff, some working for short periods. Someone leaving a company is no reason to abandon all their messages. So Threads is priced purely on the basis of the storage it uses, irrespective of the number of users. Where call transcription is deployed, the transcription service is priced simply on the duration of calls actually transcribed.
And what about data security? This is our top priority and the top priority of most of our clients, particularly those in the legal sector. We adopt all available security measures – from prevention of hacking to both the accidental and intentional deletion of data.
So you may find many services that provide a few of the features of Threads, but none will provide the unified experience that users will get from Threads at a cost that is simple to calculate and contain. If you want to unlock the vast amount of information in your digital messages, so they don’t pass each other like ships in the night, then why not try Threads today?