There are plenty of internal, company-focused chat and collaboration solutions currently on the market and now there's one more, and if you're a user of any of the Zoho apps you'll want to pay close attention.
Zoho just unveiled Cliq, a unified communication system that blends instant messaging with video, audio, and group conferencing.
Available in native, web and mobile versions, what will make Cliq appealing is that it integrates with Zoho as well as third-party applications to bring data from those applications into the Cliq window, providing chat participants contextual information about the topic being discussed.
Another interesting feature of Cliq is that it has AI-driven administration of communication - essentially Cliq can delegate administrative tasks to Zoho's Intelligent Assistant, Zia. Users can create event and meeting reminders in Cliq, and participants receive reminders before their meeting. Additionally, Zia creates the group chat before the meeting, adds all the participants, reminds them of the meeting, asks them to share files, takes notes, shares minutes of the meeting, and archives the group chat for future reference.
"More companies around the world are turning to chat for real-time, internal collaboration," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corp. "But sometimes text isn't enough, and chat software must also be able to handle voice and video communications as well as the documents, images, and other data related to the work at hand. Cliq supports this kind of dynamic, company-wide collaboration. And it provides a degree of future-proofing thanks to its unprecedented extensibility and strong developer community."
In addition to a free plan which is being offered, Cliq is also available on an Unlimited basis starting at $3 per user per month and goes down by volume (presumably based the number of users) but is also included as part of Zoho One. Additionally, Cliq will be part of Zoho's Workplace, an integrated suite of productivity and collaboration apps.
