Communications Center Startup Voximplant Debuts Conversational AI Toolkit
Cloud communications firm Voximplant has introduced a tool to embed conversational AI into contact centers. The new Avatar service uses natural language processing (NLP) for creating chatbots and voice AI agents without the need to program the usual foundational software.
Avatar Talk
Voximplant designed Avatar for developers interested in applying NLP to their communications centers without overhauling the entire edifice. The AI is set up to answer customer questions, carry out surveys, and interact with customers who call or message by text. The Voximplant models handle the backend management so that the AI can be created and deployed more quickly and without the need for a whole development team. Voximpant has used Google’s Dialogflow for NLP before, but Avatar extends that with in-house designed systems that let users see and train the AI on their own data. The free beta speaks and writes in both English and Russian, to begin with, though more languages are in the works.
“Avatar is going to be used to build intelligent voice and chatbots that can be connected to many different channels via the Voximplant platform. Thanks to the Voximplant’s integrated development environment and its serverless architecture the development of such bots is going to be a fast and convenient process,” Voximpant CEO Alexey Aylarov told Voicebot. “We have a lot of plans related to making the bot development process even easier in the future; in addition to that, we want to add the “PRO” mode for ML engineers, so they will have additional tools and flexibility when it comes to building complex bots using Voximplant Avatar. More languages will be supported, the first ones to be added are Spanish and Portuguese.”
Centering AI
Conversational AI is a central piece of modern enterprise communications. The proven value has led to steady funding and clientele for companies with the capabilities and a race to develop new and better forms of the tech, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how people work yet skyrocketed demand for customer service. Voximplant was part of the Google Launchpad Accelerator in 2017 and then raised $10 million in a Series B round at the end of 2019 led by Baring Vostok Capital Partners. The company claims more than 30,000 customers worldwide and more than a billion calls a year for brands like Burger King, Hyundai, and KFC.
Funding and growth stories are ubiquitous in the industry. Customer service voice AI developer RedRoute recently closed a $6.5 million funding round, hot on the heels of similarly positioned Talkmap’s$8 million and NLX’s raised $5 million. Those raises are significant but only hint at the amount of money going toward customer service AI overall. The $70 million raised by Kore.ai, the $78.15 million scored by Yellow.ai, Shelf.io’s pickup of $52.5 million, and Dialpad’s $170 million raise in December
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