Enterprise Voice Analytics Startup Observe.AI Raises $54M
Voice analytics startup Observe.AI has raised $54 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The startup offers a platform for transcribing and analyzing call center phone conversations and plans to add new features with the new capital. The investment comes less than a year after the company closed a $26 million Series A funding round.
Interaction Analysis
Observe.AI monitors and analyzes customer service phone calls for its clients. The company’s artificial intelligence parses the calls based on language and emotion, even identifying when and why there are silences. Private data is automatically redacted in audio and transcription so that it can be funneled into reports on how the center is performing and suggestions on improvements. The San Francisco and India-based startup pitches its platform as a way to expand the ability of a company to monitor incoming calls from just one or two percent to every single call. That data can then be analyzed without taking up a huge amount of computing resources as has been the standard. As the system gathers more data, the suggestions become better tuned to a specific company’s needs.
“Today’s contact center is mired with inefficient workflows and lack of data-driven training for frontline agents who represent the voice of the company,” Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain said in a statement. “By leveraging AI to analyze customer interactions, businesses will turn their contact centers into growth centers. This latest round of funding is a direct result of the trust we’ve built with customers and investors, and the dedication of our team.”
Customer Service
Adding artificial intelligence analytics to customer service is becoming the standard. Companies that can offer that service are in demand, including Gridspace and its Sift platform for transcribing and examining conversations with customers for useful information. Other startups are drawing in a lot of investment and may end up competing with Observe.AI, such as CallMiner, which closed a $75 million funding round from Goldman Sachs. Just this week, Replicant raised $27 million for its own approach to the industry. This year has seen a spike in demand for call center AI and analysis due to the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Virtual agent platforms like Inference Solutions and Satisfi Labs are adapting by adding pandemic-specific answers to their AI. Whether or not the voice answering a customer’s call is human or machine, the need to analyze that call is the same, so being able to leverage a big infusion of cash like this to scale up is ideal for Observe.AI.
“Ultimately, we believe that future contact centers will combine the best of automation and the best of humans,” Jain said. “While the current economic situation is pushing businesses to adopt AI at an accelerated clip and consider how to streamline operations, we do not believe that humans will be automated out of the equation.”
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Customer Service Voice Analytics Startup Observe.AI Raises $26M in Series A Funding
Speech Analytics Firm CallMiner Raises $75M From Goldman Sachs
