Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017.  Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Alexey Aylarov, CEO, Voximplant

What 2017 Has in Store for Cloud Communications

It's going to be a big year for cloud communications: 

1. Coming in 2017, cloud-based voice and video calls will be available from within all major desktop and mobile browsers - including Safari. This simple and ubiquitous availability of click-to-call solutions will make browsers an increasingly popular medium for conducting calls

2. The coming year will also see a swift rise in PaaS and SaaS solutions entering the cloud communications arena. The effect of this will be to render making phone and video calls via cloud platforms as simple and natural as sending an SMS message is today.

3. We'll also begin witnessing a breakthrough in the prevalence of reliable voice recognition technology. Low latency, Siri-quality recognition will become available to any developer in the form of a cloud service. For example, Voximplant is partnering with Google to make the most of the company's next-generation speech recognition API, making it simple for developers to implement high-fidelity call recording and transcriptions, smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems, improved end-of-speech detection for software processing and other purposes, and more valuable features.

4. The cloud communications space will see the rise of Mailchimp-like marketing solution services for engaging in mass, automated voice call efforts, enhancing the landscape for calls as a marketing tool. These solutions will feature strong "unsubscribe" policies and privacy protections to ensure they are palatable and improve their effectiveness.

5. Finally, 2017 will be the dawn of virtual and augmented reality as factors in both cloud-based calls and conferences. The capability of these technologies to enhance communication by creating the sense of call participants having a "presence" in a real or virtual shared space will be a desired goal, one that services will work to fine tune and make a true reality.

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About the Author

Alexey Aylarov is the CEO of Voximplant, a cloud platform for adding voice and video communication to web and mobile apps. Aylarov previously founded Zingaya, a web-based click-to-call service, in 2010. He lives in the Bay Area.