Industrial Virtual Assistant Startup Datch Raises $3.2M for “Voice-Visual” AI
Industrial voice assistant developer Datch has closed a $3.2 million seed funding round led by Blue Bear Capital. The startup’s “Voice-Visual” artificial intelligence uses a natural language engine to enable workers to do data collection and other paperwork by voice.
Industrial Voice
Datch acts like a standard consumer voice assistant but specialized in different work environments. Employees use the AI to manage work orders, log problems, and how they are solved and otherwise track work. The recorded info is collated with recordings and real-time data capture to allow the assistant to answer questions and make a company more efficient in general. The company has mainly been working in the energy and manufacturing industries. The AI is designed to be flexible enough to adapt to new workplaces, the company said, and the new funding will go to scaling up the company’s sales as well as adding new features to the platform.
“With industry-leading partners on board from the energy and manufacturing sectors and with a focus on digital transformation, we are well-positioned to help improve the way industrial organizations capture worker-based knowledge at the frontlines,” Datch CEO Mark Fosdike said in a statement.”What’s exciting is that Datch does away with traditional process forms and instead uses a Natural Language Engine to give workers the freedom to conversationally capture their knowledge as soon as it’s generated. Our platform lets them do this hands-free during the job without losing valuable tool time, resulting in significant productivity gains. Further to this, there are upstream advantages to capturing and structuring this knowledge data along with the play-by-play data, leading to important breakthroughs in asset-based insights.”
Enterprising AI
Using AI and voice assistants in industrial and enterprise capacities is familiar enough now for there to be several competitors, both startups and new products from larger tech companies. Gridspace uses its Sift platform for transcribing and examining conversations with customers for useful information in real-time, for instance, earning its tech a place in Twilio’s real-time call analytics service Media Streams. There’s also the new virtual assistant Kaia, built by major sales platform Outreach. Meanwhile, startups with an AI assistant for enterprise services like Observe AI and CallMiner are earning $26 million and $75 million in funding, respectively. The pace of change is only likely to accelerate as more people get used to using this kind of technology in their workplaces, which means companies like Datch are in an excellent position to be part of the bigger transition to AI-managed industrial shops.
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