Al Balasco, Radisys (00:06):
On behalf of Radisys, I'd like to welcome everybody in the audience and our panelists today to this live fireside chat called Breaking Down Barriers, enhancing Accessibility in Telecom. My name is Al Balasco. I'm the vice president of one of our lines of product lines called our Devices and Digital Applications business. We've got a great panel lined up for you today with experts across the telecom industry. We'll be discussing how innovative technologies are used to enhance accessibility, make telecom networks accessible for everyone, and what that means to the service providers and to users, the subscribers for these service providers. So why is RADS covering this topic? Radisys' is media server or media resource function is in over 200 operators networks globally. It's the anchor and engine for many digital, innovative, immersive, digital, and personalized digital services.

(01:15):
What can Radisys do and the companies on our panel do to make their networks more accessible to users of all varieties? And what are the benefits? Service providers can monetize those, monetize these services. They can comply with regulations around accessibility. They can influence and change society for the better and they can transform the lives of individuals. On our panel today, we have Alex Harmon, head of network platforms at Telefonica shall ask Gupta, vice president of IP and Enterprise at Rakuten and Ashish Jane, CEO of Kairos, and Ralph Page Director of Business Development and Sales for our digital services. So first I'd like to ask the panelists to introduce themselves. Maybe we'll start with you, Ralph.

Ralph Page, Radisys (02:11):
Yeah, hi, good afternoon. So Ralph Page, as Al said, the sales and business development director for our engaged portfolio in EMEA. Prior to that I've been RAD assist for three years. Before that I was at Ribbon looking after their as a service portfolio, so unified comms, CPAs, contact center kind of solutions. And very quickly I've been lucky enough I think to work on the accessibility portfolio at SYS for the last 12 months. So it's been a really interesting journey. I hope we'll get to talk about it throughout this panel.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (02:48):
Hello, I'm Alex Harmond. I used to work for O2 in the uk and then I moved to Telephonica in Spain after Telephonica acquisition. And I am in Madrid now working in the global CTI office for the last 16 years I think. And I lead network platforms. This include core network, service, platform voice, data, and basically the challenge we have in my team is to keep on bringing innovation invoice and communication. I'm looking forward for the discussion.

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (03:22):
Yeah. Hi, I'm Ish Gupta working as a senior VP in Rakuten Mobile Japan and I'm handling the IP engineering as well as the network operations at Rakuten Mobile Japan. I'm working in Rakuten Mobile since last five years and overall I'm having 30 years of experience in telecom industry. I'm very excited to join this panel, not as even as a Rakuten Mobile per se, but as an individual.

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (03:45):
Hi, thanks for having me here. I am Ashish Jain, CEO of Kairos Pulse. I'm a strategy consulting company helping a lot of telecom providers promote and market their innovative solutions. I've been associated with Radisys for many years and they surprise me every year with the kind of solutions that come out of the market, one of the most innovative solutions I've seen in the industry and very excited to join UL on this particular product clarity, which is I think one of the most innovative things I've seen.

Al Balasco, Radisys (04:17):
Very good. So Shailesh, I think one thing I'd like to say based on your introduction and you talk about not just kind of the personal aspect of being here, I hope once you're done, you recognizing can kind of personalize what we are talking about here and how it can affect the lives of people. This is obviously we're at a show to focus on commerce and business, but this you can see on our panel over there, these transforming communities lives and economies is what this is all about. So I'll start with some questions talking about the market and business context to tee up the discussion. So maybe I'll start with you Ralph on this. How important is accessibility and digital inclusivity for your customer's strategy? And maybe you can talk about some of the business drivers that you're talking to your customers about in this domain.

Ralph Page, Radisys (05:10):
Yeah, sure. So I think the thing that struck me over the last 12 months or so that I've been working in this is we started talking off about what are the requirements, what are the rules? But actually everyone is driving their strategy front and center around accessibility. I think all of the operators and enterprises are understanding that being able to provide accessible solutions really improves the value of their company, the way they're seen by their customers, and obviously brings more customers on board. So it's much wider than any of the European directors. I mean they are very important than some of the other directors around the world, but it's something that everyone is looking at and it's not just about, I mean it is about making money obviously, and if you bring these customers on board and you become the accessible company for that type of problem, your customers will come and that will create revenue and that will create growth. But it's more than that. It's about corporate responsibility, that kind of area.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (06:19):
Alex, well, as being a European operator, we are regulated by the European Accessibility Act in Spain. Concretely, this has been landed in each European country on a national level, so we have to comply to regulation. But beyond that, I think it's very good for as an operator, for your brand and also at the end of the day you make the services simpler and you can reach more customer and improve user experience as well. Very good.

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (06:53):
So accessibility in communication requirements varies from country to country, but principally, which I see the basic principles are same in most of the countries which believes in inclusivity and non-discrimination. Since I'm coming from Japan, Japan is very, very quality centric country and we all operators, whether it's Rakuten or any other operator, we need to follow the rules and guidelines, which is defined by the Japanese governments in Japan, there is a standard called JIS 8 3 4 1, which defines the accessibility in the communication. So he has mentioned not only as a compliance requirement, as a social responsibility also it is very, very important that all operators and including the OEM partner should fulfill the requirements defined by the governments. So I'm just focusing from the Japan market perspective in Japan, as per the survey of 2020, only the 14% people use hearing aids and the recent survey shows 15.2% people using hearing aids. So which means there is a big opportunity available in this accessibility domain within Japan also.

Al Balasco, Radisys (07:56):
Very good. Ashish, any comments based on your interactions with customers?

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (08:01):
Yeah, no, I think it's very interesting to see how the accessibility as a topic has evolved over the years. I'll say one thing, right? Over the years we've seen topics like accessibility, inclusivity have been very much guided by the regulatory aspects of what is mandated by the regulations and that's what really drives a lot of operators to do. But at the same time, I think now with the kind of innovation that is happening overall in the telecom space, the technology is enabling operators themselves to think far beyond digital regulations. And I think that's what is exciting right now for us to see the new technology. Like I said, AI is coming in, 5G is coming in and many more aspects because voice has stayed just a fundamental communication aspects of our communication. But the same time there's a mindset that voice is either becoming too commoditized, however there is so many aspects that can be enhanced on voice communications and I think that's where accessibility will play a big role in my view.

Al Balasco, Radisys (09:09):
I think that's a good point kind of implied there is service providers are often doing more than what's required by the regulatory statutes. And maybe Alex, you can talk about how this telefonica looking at accessibility beyond compliance with regulatory

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (09:32):
Acts. So the first thing as we said, I mean it doesn't have to touch on this capacity people, but in a noisy environment you can think about many services with background noise, conation frequency adaptation for people who are starting to have a hearing loss but are not reaching disability yet. So I think you can reach again, many, many customer segments and as I said, the service more accessible. So voice control, access of the service, voice translations, these kind of things really can raise a lot of interest in many use cases

Al Balasco, Radisys (10:15):
Maybe. How about you shalesh? Beyond the regulatory considerations, how does Rakuten look at how they can make their network more accessible and benefit users?

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (10:26):
So as I've mentioned that I'm coming from Japan where it is very, very important from the quality perspective. If I see old days before mobile, we were in the T DM where we used to use a G seven 11 code where we never thought about the voice quality and voice quality was super. But when we moved to the mobile era where the air resource is the most costliest resource for any mobile operator and where we have started using different codec which reduces the quality of the voice, that's why we are discussing this accessibility as a solution. So we at Rakuten, apart from the legal compliance, we believe this is a social responsibility. So we work with the independent partners like Okla, open Signal and other open third party companies where we compare our network quality, voice quality with global standards and we ensure our network within our network. Also we have multiple voice applications, so we compare the voice quality of different applications and challenge each other. So our objective is to as a social responsibility also apart from the legal compliance, we try to ensure accessibility quality should be as far as superiors should be available for our customer.

Al Balasco, Radisys (11:35):
Very good. Ralph, any anecdotes you can share about your customer, your experiences with customers and their strategies in this domain?

Ralph Page, Radisys (11:41):
So the thing I find really interesting is that most people so far have been focusing on communications and that's obviously because everyone here is into communications. So you see things for the heart of hearing that we're obviously going to talk about later and for the people blind and things like that. But what people are suddenly I think starting to realize is we can really help in ways that perhaps as communications people we hadn't realized, so loneliness, people who are actually starting to suffer medical problems because they don't get out much actually with the comms we can actually help with those kind of things. So I would say that's starting. I think most of it today has been about we've got the regulations, we must get the comms and we're all suddenly realizing as we walk around the show we're going, oh, hang on a minute, I've got this gadget and maybe I can do something a bit different. And I'm just starting to see that happening.

Al Balasco, Radisys (12:37):
Very good. I think one thing I would also add, and it kind of really struck me today with folks who are coming by the booth and watching some of the demonstrations we have for enhanced accessibility, the natural inclination is to think about how this helps the user with a disability, but it has an impact on friends and family of the users with disability as well. So it's even more far reaching than the subscribers who are afflicted with different disabilities. Maybe turning, switching gears to talk about some of the challenges for users first and also for service providers in users in that users face when trying to access this network capabilities. And then from the service provider point of view or challenges you have in making services available to these demographics.

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (13:34):
So accessibility is not only limited to the disability people only we need to ensure as a service provider it should be available for the old people, it should be available for the non illiterate people, it should be available for the child, it should be available for the multi-language people also. So it's not only limited to the disability only. So as a Rakuten, we ensure our service and product is available for all the challenge personally, which I feel that we as an industry is facing that we are using multiple codex and sometimes when we exchange a voice call between operator to operator, those codex get interchanged, which reduces the quality once again in the entire network where I believe this engage clarity type of tools, innovation can come and help all operators.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (14:25):
So I think in term of challenges, the first one is to make it easy for the user. So accessibility has to be built in your service. So it cannot be like a separate app, it has to be fully integrated. And we have this policy in Telephonica on having accessibility as a design. So we are committed that all our new services during 2025, we have this built in accessibility as a design and I think as an operator the main challenge we face is device compatibility. So when we start thinking about voice, voice is based standard so we can bring many services around it, but if we want to do more stuff around data is very complex because the operating system, the access to it, the integration to it. So I think the device really right now is a bit the pain point for operators like us to foster new services.

Al Balasco, Radisys (15:23):
Good. Actually we'll come back to that point too. I think more about the ecosystem and the relevance of the ecosystem in just a bit.

Ralph Page, Radisys (15:30):
So what I've been spending a lot of time with user groups, some of the solutions we've been working on, and I think maybe what we don't realize is as we create more and more digital and exciting elements in the world, these people are getting left further and further behind. And I've actually heard people say to me kind of jokingly, they go, oh, I'm not of this world or I don't understand this world and that's pretty heartbreaking. And when you look at, you ask Dale, how does it affect people as I'm not an engineer but I'm going to pretend to be one for a second. So we as engineers who look at someone who's got hearing difficulty, you might say, oh right, so all I need to do is make sure they can hear better. But the hearing difficulty is just the bit of the iceberg you can see at the top.

(16:17):
If you look what happens, and I'm going to give you an example because my dad did it and I thought, brilliant, I can use this in all the shows now. So I realized that he'd stopped actually calling the doctor and doing his doctor's appointments and getting his prescriptions. I was like, dad, what are you doing? He said, I can't talk to the nurse on the stupid phone as he called it. I can't get a doctor's appointment so I can't get my prescriptions. Now of course I solved that problem, I rang up the doctor and I sorted it all out. But the people who don't have a son living nearby or living on their own, what actually happens is first of all they don't talk to the doctor, then they stop talking to family and friends, they can't really understand them, then they don't go out much, then they get ill because they actually haven't been going out much and apparently it even can lead to dementia. So these things that we're doing if we don't add accessibility is way beyond the fact someone can't hear a phone call.

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (17:14):
I think the question you asked is very important because you asked about the challenges of implementing or handling accessibility by operators. One of the challenge I've seen is a lot of time the way solutions are looked at are very much around what are the telecom solutions available to solve this problem. If you look at around the world, actually the kind of solutions that have been handled for accessibility are, okay, I can have hearing aid compatible phones or I can convert voice into text, right? Or I can give them some sort of a relay services at the end of the day. To Ralph's point, going back, I mean you have to look at holistically what problem are you solving and how can you actually solve that in the context of when they're actually using it. Whether it was an enlightening experience for us when we were going through all this user experience journey in terms of, okay, what kind of voice enhancements can be done.

(18:14):
It has nothing to do with voice enhancement. They are even struggling to figure out how do we switch from an app to a phone call to go figure out things. So there is a context of helping them understand the new technology, but at the same time, the more you can do, and in fact this is something which is very important and you brought it up several times on how do we fix the Kodak? How can you fix something within the context of the voice call that you're actually having or something they're already doing versus sending them or asking them to do or use another device or another application or something else. I think that has been the problem is we have been relying too much on the ecosystem of devices and applications to solve the problem versus trying to solve the problem within the context of how they're actually using the surface.

Al Balasco, Radisys (19:03):
There's been a lot of emphasis in some of the answers here around hearing loss. And let me explain the context for that. So everybody on the panel has some experience with one of the applications we're offering in this space called Engage Clarity. Engage clarity is essentially like a hearing aid in the network and 20% of people globally are afflicted with some level of hearing loss. What Clarity does is allow people to, it enhances the audio in a real time call automatically and without any user intervention to allow people with hearing loss to get more make calls comprehensible. And that's done on a personalized level. So we're using technologies including AI to adapt that audio to the individual's hearing loss. So that's the context for that and hopefully you folks can come and see a demonstration of this. And it's also interesting because voice, we talked a lot about voice here, voice is kind of a lowest common denominator, but now with new innovations like 5G, new calling, more and more acceptance even in on network for video calls, more immersive experiences. So Alex, I know you're very keen on what's happening. You talked about the ecosystem and devices and I think one thing in terms of voice being the lowest common denominator is it is really device agnostic. But maybe you can talk a little bit about how you see new technologies for more immersive experience and more capabilities for accessibility unfolding and what some of the challenges there are.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (20:46):
So we are trialing all these use cases with Redis in Telephonica in Brazil. And I think it's a journey, right? Voice is great because it's completely standard, can go into all the phones, send us on step is to leverage VT and through video we can push real time translation to the customer And going forward we see that with enhancing 5G nuclear capabilities, we can bring much more like do more immersive content even if we can think about going forward autographic communication or whatever the future may brings. But for that we need this IMS data channel capability, which is also a standard that the industry has defined, but the penetration of this capability is still quite low and we need I think to push as an industry for it to be available across the ecosystem if we want to keep on bringing value all these customers and do pricing for society, right?

Al Balasco, Radisys (21:52):
Esh,

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (21:54):
So as I mentioned the Japan, the hearing aid adoption rate is very, very low compared to the other countries hardly it's 15.2% as of now. So it looks a big opportunity from the network perspective, we try to improve voice accessibility as far as possible from the application whatever. Personally I feel the development which is happening in this accessibility domain like has rightly Asish has rightly mentioned it's happening in the device front. So most of the, it's innovation, whatever is happening, it is in the device as of now. So looking this forward of this engaged clarity solution. So we are in the very discussion phase as of now with Reds looking forward to improve accessibility in Japan market using this solution. And maybe if we can monetize further

Al Balasco, Radisys (22:42):
Ashish any comments based on your customer interactions,

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (22:45):
We have to look at to your earlier point on how the technology has evolved over the period of time. So there a lot of new stuff and to Alex's point, the adoption is low at this point because of, again, it's a regulated industry and it takes time to implement this holistically over a network, but at the same time the promise of what 5G is bringing to market and 5G and AI on top of that and a combination of an existing services, I always say this telecom providers are the largest social network, I mean 4.3 trillion minutes of calls every year. I mean what largest network would you ever have then can monetize on that and they're sitting on a gold mine to be honest. And there is so much to be monetized beyond just providing traditional voice call plans in my view. Because the way the AI is evolving, the way the technology is evolving in terms of how you can combine the benefits of data channels, the data interactions on the voice communications.

(23:48):
I know many technologies have tried failed RCS, one of them, maybe some of them won't believe me on that one. But yes, there has been many attempts to combine interactions with voice in the past. But I definitely feel the way the direction is going with 5G new calling and the way AI will play a bigger role in all of this is going to transform how we interact and communicate over to lefty network. And that will only happen once operators like yourself will think beyond voice packages, voice plans and think about solving the customer problem first and then bringing technology as a way to deliver that.

Ralph Page, Radisys (24:27):
So you've gone to my favorite subject about what could we do and I started off being a bit negative by people who have these problems and stuff, but my goodness, if you walk around the show, we look at the stuff we've got on our stand, we have the power already to make big differences with the way people can access services. And the really important thing, and I think the operators can really help us with this, is understanding what those problems are. And as usual, I've got an example. So I actually was doing a similar show like this and after the show we were showing our generative AI digital assistant and this guy came up to me and he said, I'm a doctor and I'm wondering could you do an assistant that looks like me that my patients when they're at home, because we send them at home and often they're on their own and I want and they have to call in and give their blood stats and that kind of thing and I want to greet them and then I want to dip A CRM and see what their interest is and maybe ask them one or two questions about say the football game.

(25:27):
And my reaction was probably the same reaction that all you guys have, which is who on earth wants to talk to a bot asking me a couple of automatic football questions? And I said that to him and he said, no, you see you don't understand. I'm not selling it to you, I don't need it for you. You are not the accessibility problem. These people are at home, they look forward to calling an IVR genuinely because it breaks up their day. So if they can then have just some kind of interaction with someone that looks like me or one of my nurses and it could be about football or whatever it is that changes lives and we can do that. We can do it today. We've got the demo to do it today. So already hopefully you'll ask me in a minute what we can do in the future. I've, there's some great ideas, but already I think we've got really powerful solutions.

Al Balasco, Radisys (26:15):
And I think that's a good point, Ralph, even while we are waiting for standards to evolve and the ecosystem to come on board, we can start to, if we focus on the user journey and let's use accessibility in the broadest sense of the word, doesn't matter anybody, we can empower any users with new capabilities. Voice might be the lowest common denominator. But if you combine the voice network, the original social network, the universal social network messaging capabilities on the phone and even the web browser in conjunction with each other, service providers can create immersive high value experiences that appeal to a broad cross section of their subscribers. As these standards evolve in the ecosystem comes on board and as a stepping stone, rather than thinking about these as proprietary solutions, they're using capabilities that are already in the network and already in the phone, but in creative ways that focus on the user journey and making it easy for these capabilities to be immersive and personalized. On the topic of innovation and new capabilities, what's on the horizon? Things that might not even be in the mainstream press, what technologies are you thinking about leapfrogging and what's next? Maybe Alex?

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (27:41):
So I think for us, Excel and immersive communication is very interesting. We're working on it for the last couple of years already and can bring so many use cases for accessibility. We have this collaboration we have done through European project with partners where we are showing this XR communication capabilities that can bring people to accessibility and help people. But again, I would like to insist that it has to be an industry move to do this adoption because voice is a less common denominator, but the voice traffic is going down in general and this means that people are using less service. So if we don't bring this new capability, I think we'll lose the universe of it and the interest to bring it to all and people will need it. So I think we need as an industry to stand up and bet for these new services, which is so key for society right now. So

Al Balasco, Radisys (28:42):
Yep, Shah

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (28:44):
Rakuten, we believe in innovation. So maybe you can see in the Rakuten booth our key focus from the network is we are focusing on open ran and cloud native architecture as a future. So when I'm saying from the open ran, especially from the accessibility perspective, our objective is to ensure the seamless handovers between 4G, 5G different technologies. Our objective is to move everything into the software to ensure, especially from the accessibility perspective, there is seamless voice quality for our consumer. Very good

Al Balasco, Radisys (29:16):
Ashish.

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (29:17):
Well I think if you ask a technologist like me, I can give you a lot of ideas on what is up for the innovation, but I think what Alex said is very important. I think the voice traffic is going down. I think if we just pause and just ask ourself, okay, voice traffic is going down, is it really going down or is it just moving to something else? Right? So it is going down from a traditional telecom network perspective, but it is not going down. People are talking more. We are leveraging other tools and technologies to do that. But I think with again, the kind of innovation that is needed on the telecom networks is critical to bring that not just the voice traffic back, but also bring the subscribers back and having that trust and confidence they always had in the telecom services. Now whether the phone factor of that delivery of communication, of course it's going to evolve over the period of time.

(30:15):
I mean we have seen how the phones have evolved. We're already seeing smart devices like watches and glasses and everything. We may not be too dependent on phone, phone become a phone factor, but at the end of the day it's about the experience you're having on that communication. And I think that's where I am very positive about how the data communications and the voice communications are going to converge in future and bring more immersive experiences to the end user where the boundaries between voice data messaging are going to blur and then AI will play a big role in it. Ralph mentioned about an AI assistant, I think that is already part and parcel of our lives today as devices, but those devices are going to go away. They will be part of our part and parcel of our communications and it'll be available all the time.

Al Balasco, Radisys (31:09):
Sounds good Ralph.

Ralph Page, Radisys (31:13):
So I'm going to answer the question by what would I like to be presenting in two years time and hopefully with the extra power that's coming with some of the gen AI and then the work that Alex is talking about with what the networks can do, we're going to see more powerful capabilities being able to be delivered to any endpoint. So what are the two things I want? Based on what I've been talking about, I would really like to be able to have a digital assistant that can do sign language so we can bring the deaf, not just the hard of hearing into a solution. It's, there's a lot of power required to do sign language, but I think we could see something like that with the gen ai I talked about that chat bot that's going to answer two football questions. Well, with what we see with Jack GPT, I'm certain in two years time I'm going to be able to have a discussion with a bot that's going to help me understand how pep gladiola is going to save man city season and that person and those lonely people I talked about or people can be brought together in little communities that even could be managed by an AI assistant.

(32:20):
So I think there's some fantastic stuff coming in the next two to three, four years.

Al Balasco, Radisys (32:25):
Very good. And I just want to come back to one thing you said Ashish about voice transitioning. People are talking more and more I think with what we're talking about here, augmenting voice with visual and other interactive making voice and the connectivity available in ways that weren't accessible before. For example, hey, I'm not going to make a phone call to somebody who doesn't speak English because I don't speak any other language, but now I can reach more people by doing translation in the network. 20% of a user population that has hearing loss and therefore is not using the network to interact with people. That's another way to extend the use, expand the use of networks. So maybe we'll wrap up with a final question. It'd be interesting to see from accessibility, however you define it, in any use, any aha moments that you might reflect on here from your own self, your friends and family or even subscribers that they might have talked to you about what they got out of the network that helped them because of what you've done with accessibility. We'll start with you Ralph.

Ralph Page, Radisys (33:41):
Yeah, so for me that's actually an easy answer. So the big thing about accessibility is people who have accessible issues want to be the same as everyone else. So the bigger aha moment for me, and I'm doing a little bit of a sales job, but that's my job from the hearing solution we have is that it's delivered in the same way as, I hate to use the word normal people, but people who don't have accessibility issues do the same thing. So someone, a young kid who is nervous about looking like he's the one with the hearing problems in the class can now answer the phone in the same way that all his mates can. Super powerful. And if we get the interfaces right, any accessible solutions, people will want them, people will buy them and they'll come on our networks.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (34:29):
Very

Al Balasco, Radisys (34:29):
Good.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (34:29):
Alex. I think as an operator for us the important is to be at the level of expectation of our customers. So whatever is a situation to be able to connect them to people they need to speak with and make this communication universal for them so it's really be able to satisfy what they expect. It's what we're working on and we hope that we'll continue evolving our services far.

Al Balasco, Radisys (34:58):
Very good, thank you.

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (35:00):
As I mentioned, accessibility is not limited only to disability people. As a network operator, we ensure accessibility quality is available for all type of communication. Like he has rightly mentioned, voices moving towards a video call. So as operator, we ensure whatever we can do to improve the accessibility we are doing and personally I'm very, very happy and looking forward this engaged clarity solution if it improves the accessibility for the network. Thank you.

Al Balasco, Radisys (35:28):
Very good, thanks Lesh. Ashish.

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (35:31):
Well, I think the question of aha moment to me was when I was doing a study across the world looking at how accessibility is being solved by the operators. And I think that was an aha moment for me and it was, to be honest, very underserved in terms of how it is being handled. It is, I categorize them into three broad way of solving the problem. One is handsets, second is relay services, and third is translating into text. And I feel there is a lot more, lot more that can be done by operators. The technologies are out there and I think it's a matter of operators to open up their mind and start looking at those technologies and I think that's a big aha moment for me.

Al Balasco, Radisys (36:17):
Yeah, I think that's interesting because you just think about that the examples that you used, not only do they maybe underserved the market, but they're also pretty sterile right now. What you can do with immersive experiences, not only personalize them but make them very impactful and tied to tug at people's heartstrings and emotions. So maybe I'll wrap with one my aha moment. The product manager, coincidentally the product manager who is responsible for the clarity application that we talked about here has a relative woman who is in her early twenties. When she was young, she had a drowning accident. In fact, she almost died, but her eardrums were perforated. And so she was one of the users that we had try this application and she was able to comprehend conversations that she could not before on the phone. And the most impactful thing about it, the product manager said when she was experiencing this, he was with her and her face just lit up. And so really again, this is about transforming networks and capabilities and transforming society and transforming people's lives and making it worthwhile from a business perspective. Thanks to everyone on the panel, appreciate your perspective and insights and thanks for everybody in the audience for your time.

(37:46):
Any questions from the audience?

Audience Member 2 (37:49):
Yeah, I think you all talked about different forms of accessibility. We focused a lot upon on hearing and there are of course other forms of accessibility. Can I understand? Maybe I can hear, but I really don't understand your language. So what do I do now? Maybe none of this is comprehensible. Maybe it takes me time to understand. So if I could actually read stuff, it was better. Are there things that as operators you're thinking about to create a more comprehensive experience as opposed to specific solutions like one for hearing, one for translation service, et cetera. One that just says, okay, I got this one thing it'll do for me.

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (38:36):
So as we said, yeah, airing is an issue, but as you said, translation is very important. That's one of the use case. We are traveling with rare disease. Being able in Japanese could be a good example. I mean it's so important for people to be able to communicate in that way and we can technically already do that and we have tested it with the platform. But again, I mean to insist to have these multi-use cases really need to be supported by the ecosystem. So this as an example, this time translation, technically we leverage VT for that and VT is not supported by Apple devices. So I can offer it to Android, Android and any device that supports VT but not to Apple. So it just fragment this idea that we need to help everybody, not people who have a specific device. So that's what we need I think to improve this ecosystem bet on accessibility service.

Ralph Page, Radisys (39:41):
I think we have the tools in our toolbox to help lots of different accessible solutions. And I think actually what we're lacking is that understanding of what actually helps people in certain situations. So I gave you some examples of loneliness. I gave you some examples of my father. I've talked about hearing why because those are the three I've been working on now. I don't know, there are probably problems with accessibility in hospitality for example. Will they be a one size fits all? No. Have we got the tools to fix it? Probably, but they don't know the hospitality. People don't know to ask us because they don't think comms people can solve it. And we don't do the hospitality to stay in a lot of hotels, but I don't have accessibility problem. But joking aside site, I think if we can cross that bridge and it's the operators and it's the vendors and it's the enterprises just being curious and asking each other, oh, I'm a doctor, can you create an assistant that looks like me? Yes I can. Why do you want that? It's that kind of curiosity. I think that will get us to where you are pointing towards, if that makes sense.

Audience Member 1 (40:49):
Thank you.

Al Balasco, Radisys (40:50):
Maybe one thing I'd say in response to that too is you talk about these discreet applications and capabilities, but in essence they can be combined and to serve different applications and markets, they can be mixed and just extending the assistance for hearing impaired users, being able to combine that call clarity with call captioning or even being able to essentially translate sign language and turn that into text. These things can augment the experience. And not only for hearing impaired users, I mean a lot of us, especially with covid and since on conference calls all the time, it's taxing the more that you can improve the experience for any user and augment that so they can improve the in real time experience and even refer back to the data, whether it's using AI to collect that and help interpret it or refer back to the transcription in notes from your meeting half an hour later because you might've forgotten a particular anecdote. And I think that's one of the key things too, is thinking about how can we make it easier for service providers to take these capabilities and easily assemble them, cost effectively into services for users. And the more they can tailor 'em for specific user groups, the better and more high value it is for the subscriber and for the service provider.

Audience Member 2 (42:19):
I have one question related to like you mentioned TDM part, the voice connectivity was very good, the clarity and everything. And in last maybe 10 years in standards, we have seen a lot of things happening on the upper layer, mainly the OR in the clarity platform which we are developing. But is there something which is coming to the lower layer, like what we can enhance, what standards can we enhance with to have more and more? I know it is not good to have such kind of things at the lower layer, but still if there is something which can be done in standard, which can enhance the quality and all these, the problems which we are facing nowadays with this packet network.

Al Balasco, Radisys (43:05):
Maybe this is a question for the service provider representative.

Shailesh Gupta, Rakuten Mobile (43:09):
See from the mobile era perspective, the biggest biggest issue is handovers. We have so many sites, so many sites here we are talking about the accessibilities. When the packet handover happens from one side to another side, if handover is not proper, whatever quality we have ultimately from the user perspective, you'll not hear whether it's a disabled or non-disabled person. So as an industry, definitely a lot of standardization. It's improved with the 5G era. Again, it was going to improve especially from the handovers and from the network perspective, like you mentioned the lower layer, I believe the new codex will further improve the accessibility in communication

Alexandre Harmand, Telefónica (43:48):
By in Telefonica we're working a lot on network slicing, which is I think a very good mechanism to help this kind of services. I mean we can prioritize this kind of accessibility service for our customer. So right now we are thinking slicing more for B2B, but that could be a B2C scenario. Okay. And again, in B2C, we are a bit dependent on operating systems and devices. But yeah, it's a very good scenario for network slicing to build the priority traffic slides for accessibility services.

Ralph Page, Radisys (44:25):
Right at the beginning I said we are creating lots of new and exciting things that sometimes it hard for accessibility. And I'm just going to answer it slightly differently. I think you were talking about quality and codex and things, and a lot of people have said to me when we've been talking about the harder hearing thing, oh well, as we get better codex and we can actually get better sound, it'll be better for people. We don't need that kind of solution. So I've spent a lot of time in the sphere of the heart of hearing and I've learned things that I just didn't understand. And one of them is that actually the better quality of the sound, the worse it is for them. And the reason is is because what's actually going on in their heads is certain sounds are actually covering over the intelligibility piece, the actual bit. We need to hear the words, we don't need all the other stuff. But if you make that better quality, you've actually made the stuff that's making it hard for 'em to hear even louder if you like. So what these guys said is absolutely correct, but when we look at accessibility, let's be careful that we don't actually make it worse.

Al Balasco, Radisys (45:26):
Alex's answer made me, I think one other thing we need to make sure as regardless of where in the stack these capabilities are enabled, making it easy for developers to leverage these capabilities is really important. And that's how service providers who want to reach a broad cross section of users with horizontal services can use the ecosystem and standards like Kamara and network APIs to leverage the capabilities of the network to tailor them to improve accessibility regardless of what aspect of the network buried in the network or at the application tier. So that ecosystem concept that Alex talked about a few times extends out to creating developer communities. And I think that telecoms, most developers don't think of the telecom operators as these are what I want to develop around. But with standards emerging like Kamara and others and capabilities like we're offering in the engage platform, that is kind of the underlying building blocks for the clarity application. Giving those empowering developers who have no idea what the innards of the telephone network is. Also really important to making more accessible capabilities and making those capabilities available personalizable to users or businesses.

Ashish Jain, Kairos Pulse (46:47):
I can already tell a lot of people have been in the telecom space for more than 20 years on this floor here. Okay, I'm going to ask one question to you. Mass personalization, this was a keyword several years back. How many of you can tell me what mass personalization services are offered on telecom? Anybody? I'll tell you, it was ringtone. It was by your phone of your color. Okay, so these are the mass personalization, again, devices, ring tones, things like that. There was no mass personalization of your communication experience. There's no mass personalization of your own AI assistant. So the technology, the way it is evolving is going to enable to answer your question on what can be done at the lower layer. It's actually not at the lower layer. It's going to be at the application layer. It's how do you make the application intelligent enough to understand what that particular user need in that context and go all the way down to the lowest layer to make it possible. And I think network slicing is an example of that. But again, it is happening at a B two, B level, at an industry level, not at a user level. Ultimately it'll happen, but I think mass personalization is where the technology needs to come and make it happen.

Al Balasco, Radisys (48:01):
Thanks everyone. Please give a hand to the panel here. Thanks for your time.