Robert Ambrogi Blog
With the Clio Cloud Conference coming up next week, several of the companies that will be exhibiting there are preparing announcements of new features and product enhancements. I’ll cover a few of those in advance of the conference and more once it kicks off.
One company making several announcements is Tali, the voice-driven time-tracking application that I have written about several times before. Earlier this week, I spoke with Tali cofounder and CEO Matthew Volm about his company’s latest news.
New bar partners. Last March, I reported that Tali had entered into its first affinity partnership with a bar association, giving members of the Ohio State Bar Association a discount on the purchase of Tali. Now, Tali has added two more bar partners, The Florida Bar and The Bar Association of San Francisco, and Volm says several others are in the works.
New investments. Last year, Tali received its first investment, an undisclosed amount from Mucker Capital, an early stage venture capital firm based in Santa Monica, Calif. Now, Volm said, Tali has received additional investments from Cascade Angels, a company that focuses on investing in Oregon businesses, and the Geekdom Fund. Volm declined to disclose the amounts of the investments.
Spanish-language support. By the end of the year, Tali plans to support voice commands in Spanish on Amazon Alexa devices. The company is working with Amazon as it prepares to launch a Spanish version of Alexa, which is planned for before the end of the year. Clio already has customers in a number of Spanish-speaking countries, so this will enable those customers to enter time using Tali in their native language.
Tali for Cortana. Tali is now available in a beta version to users of the Microsoft Office business suite, enabling users to interact with Tali via the Cortana voice application. Going beyond voice, Tali is also allowing Microsoft users to enter commands using email in Outlook or chat in Skype for Business.
Tali is looking for legal professionals who are interested in serving as beta testers for the Microsoft Office interface. Anyone interested should contact Tali through its website or directly email Volm.
Zapier integration. Tali is also beta testing an integration with Zapier, a tool for connecting different web applications to automate actions between them. The integration allows users to connect Tali to various other billing and project-management applications. It is also looking for beta testers for this integration, so anyone interested should contact the company through the links mentioned above.
Users can now better manage time and projects from Tali’s enhanced dashboard.
Enhanced dashboard functionality. Although many Tali customers use it to enter time into third-party applications such as Clio, it also has its own dashboard where users can view and manage their time entries. At Clio, Tali will be releasing a new dashboard that will provide additional features for managing time, a calendar view of time entered, and the ability to add and manage clients and matters directly from the dashboard (as opposed to having to add these within Clio or some other application).
The dashboard provides a calendar view of time entered.
Improved voice matching. Like any voice application, Tali sometimes has trouble understanding the name of a client or matter. To improve recognition, Tali is introducing fuzzy matching, in which it will take what it heard and make its best guess based on your existing matters and contacts. This will include a machine-learning element, so that Tali’s fuzzy matching will improve with use. In addition, Tali is being programmed with built-in legal-activity descriptions to train it to better understand what lawyers are likely to say.
In addition to Clio, Tali integrates with Rocket Matter and PracticePanther.