By creating an AI-driven home operating system, the company believes it can reduce service calls.

Sue Marek, Special Contributor

March 31, 2020

3 Min Read
Amdocs tries to tap into the connected home market with doxi OS

Amdocs is moving beyond the back office and into the home. The operations support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) provider last week introduced a new home operating system for service providers to offer with their broadband routers. The company's goal is to make the home router more intuitive so that consumers can better manage their home connectivity and the connectivity of all their devices.

According to Gil Rosen, general manager at Amdocs, homes now have an average of 20 connected devices. Whenever there is a problem with a device, most people only know how to do one thing – reboot the router. When that doesn't work, they then call their home broadband provider and expect them to troubleshoot their problems.

Amdocs conducted a survey of more than 4,500 people and found that between 10% to 13% don't even know where their router is. Meanwhile, about 40% said that they hide their router.

"The router hasn't changed much over the years," Rosen said. "It's basically just blinking lights. We want to change this."

With Amdocs' new home operating system, which it calls doxi OS, service providers can provide consumers with artificial intelligence (AI)-based insights and help them troubleshoot any connectivity issues. Using voice commands that then interact with a home assistant device (such as Google's Alexa), customers can use doxi to figure out whether there is a problem with their home broadband connection, or whether their connected device is malfunctioning.

The OS can also provide the homeowner with information such as how many people are in the home and alert them to any activity on any of their connected devices. "You can program it to get an alert that will tell you if there is an unusual number of devices in the house," Rosen said. Alternatively, you can also use it to monitor usage or the number of minutes that are being used for certain activities like gaming. Plus it can also be used to enforce parent control over certain devices as well as help monitor devices to prevent cybersecurity risks.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to having a home OS like doxi is that it could help service providers reduce the number of calls to their customer service departments, or reduce the length of the calls. "If a consumer is having a problem with Netflix, it could be the connection between the home and the Internet or it could be the end device," Rosen said. "This will help consumers fix it or make the call to customer service shorter."

Veego's role
As part of Amdoc's introduction of its new home OS, the company also announced it is an investor and strategic partner to Veego Software, an Israel-based startup that uses AI to help troubleshoot problems with connected devices. According to Rosen, Veego's technology will be incorporated into doxi to help provide the data intelligence and Wi-Fi analytics.

Interestingly, Amdocs is also working with an Italian device maker to design a much more stylish broadband router. Rosen said the router will act as a platform for its doxi home OS software. However, he said that service providers can deploy doxi with their existing routers.

— Sue Marek, special to Light Reading. Follow her @suemarek.

About the Author(s)

Sue Marek

Special Contributor

Follow Sue on Twitter @suemarek

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