Enterprise AI Developer Chatlayer.ai Acquired by Sinch

Enterprise conversational artificial intelligence developer Chatlayer.ai has been acquired by mobile cloud communications firm Sinch for an undisclosed sum. Sinch plans to bring Chatlayer.ai’s voice and text AI platform to its international customers.

Business Chat

Chatlayer.ai provides businesses with an AI that uses a natural language understanding engine to interact with customers through text and voice. The Belgian startup’s platform is currently used by insurance provider Foyer, the Belfius bank, and other companies that have a lot of customer interaction. The AI can handle routine questions and conversations with those customers, freeing up a lot of people who would otherwise need to staff the phone and digital chatrooms non-stop.

“We have built a platform that leverages AI and NLU to improve customer experience and drive measurable business outcomes,” Chatlayer.ai CEO Rick van Esch said in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Sinch who adds deep mobile expertise and can help scale our offering to an international audience.”

The three-year-old company claims its software can speak with people in more than 100 languages. That’s an especially useful trait for international conversations, and Sinch, although based in Sweden, has offices in more than 30 countries. The AI is designed to work out what the customer’s goal with the conversation is while engaging in a dialogue that feels natural. The platform then analyzes the interaction to provide insight to the company about its customers.

“Cloud communications and mobile technology fundamentally transform how brands can engage with their customers,” Sinch CEO Oscar Werner said in a statement. “We are now seeing how next-generation messaging channels, which are designed to be conversational, are creating new opportunities for brands to enrich their customer experience. Growing our capabilities in AI and NLU is an important way for Sinch to ensure that our enterprise customers and channel partners can fully realize this opportunity”,

Enterprising AI

Applying AI to handle and analyze customer interactions is becoming the norm in business. Companies like Gridspace, which uses its Sift platform for transcribing and examining conversations with customers for useful information in real time are in high demand,  as evidenced by how it provides technology for Twilio’s real-time call analytics service Media Streams. Big companies are eager to invest in or acquire smaller firms with that kind of technology, such as Observe AI $26 million funding round or the $75 million that Goldman Sachs invested in CallMiner. The utility goes beyond the purely financial as well. Orbita created an interactive chatbot and voice assistant for healthcare organizations to help deal with people wanting to ask about the COVID-19 pandemic. The AI answers questions and helps triage people who may have been infected.

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