Zoho adds features that can turn a video call into remote assistance for repairing cars, appliances and more

• Zoho Lens will leverage augmented reality to enable technicians to offer technical support to their customers remotely.
• Zoho Lens converts your mobile phone to act as remote eyes according to Zoho One’s marketing head Hariharan Muralimanohar.
• Zoho has also launched Zoho Commerce to enable retailers to set up their online shops and provide them with necessary tools.

All this while you must have heard about your nearest kirana store coming online, but did anyone check with the nearest technician what he has been up to? Well soon there will be similar development happening on this front as well.

You don’t need to wait for hours to get your internet or your car or your microwave oven fixed. Now you can do it all by yourself within a couple of minutes.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zoho Corp has rolled out its latest smart remote assistant app called Zoho Lens to help you with it. The app — which mixes smart lens with video calling feature — will allow even your nearest technicians to set up stores online and assist you as you take on this new challenge.

So how does this work?

The company’s latest Zoho Lens app will leverage augmented reality (AR) to help technicians impart their technical know-how to the customer over a video call.

Zoho Lens will give a “comprehensive view” of a customer's technical issues, the company says.

A technician can simply invite the customer to a virtual session, exactly like how a video chat would work. The customer just needs to show the troubled device through their smartphone or smart glasses camera.

“So what Zoho Lens does is, it can convert your mobile phone to act as remote eyes,” highlights Hariharan Muralimanohar, head of marketing at Zoho One, one of Zoho’s product suite.

But why not simply video call a technician?

At the core of it, Zoho Lens is a video calling feature with a technician who will help you repair your own devices.

But the technicians can also take a screenshot and freeze the camera screen to have a better estimate of the issue, while interacting on voice over or text chat.

The technician will also be able to add an extra layer of annotation tools into the live video stream to help the customer identify the issues on their devices. This will help the technician to analyse a particular issue and help the customer even further.


“You call a technician and they ask you what the problem is, so you can take your phone and point the camera at the problem area. [With the help of Zoho Lens], the technician is able to get a clearer view of what is really going on and he can then annotate on top of the app and tell you how it can be solved” Muralimanohar added.

“This [Zoho Lens] is helping a technician to still do his job without being able to be in person, which is a situation that we are all facing now,” he added.

Who can use it?

The enterprise tech startup claims that this latest feature can help individuals solve technical issues like car repairs, appliance repair, fixing an unstable internet connection and more.

The Zoho Lens feature can be used by several industries including healthcare, maintenance and repair, customer service, insurance, manufacturing, construction and more.

A standard one month subscription of Zoho Lens costs ₹720 per technician per month, where as a professional one would come up to ₹960.

Besides this, Zoho has also launched Zoho Commerce to enable retailers to set up their online shops and provide them with tools to construct websites, accept orders, track inventory and more. This offering will allow 100 product businesses to set up online stores in three weeks.

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