SoundHound Debuts Real-Time AI Transcription and Annotation Service

SoundHound has unveiled a new enterprise voice AI tool for real-time conversational collection and analysis called Intelligent Transcription. The new service combines speech-to-text processing with natural language understanding to annotate and mark different topics and speakers while they are still talking.

Secretarial AI

Intelligent Transcription applies SoundHound’s voice AI platform to arenas like business meetings, sales calls, and customer service contact centers. The AI performs the secretarial duties of collating notes and transcribing an audio record as it happens. When the conversation is over, the user can see the long-form version written down and marked up based on the topics mentioned, including important details like time, money amounts, and social security numbers. The AI can tag those topics and key details, even suggesting appropriate follow-up actions. SoundHound described how a caller might request to cancel a service or leave a message with a time and phone number to call them back. The AI would note the cancellation request and the time and number to reach the caller, respectively, as they happen, speeding up agent response time. The Intelligent Transcription service offers existing topic databases and can design customized knowledge bases as needed, and the AI’s machine learning allows the service to learn and automatically improve over time.

“In a fast-paced environment, real-time transcription can be invaluable. But often it’s difficult to identify key topics or important information in the flow of a conversation,” SoundHound chief product officer James Hom said. “Not only is our new transcription service extremely accurate, it’s powered by advanced AI technology that gives shape and structure to dialogue. This makes new information from live conversations more easily actionable, drawing the agent’s attention to meaning and details that may otherwise be missed. The net result is that Intelligent Transcription equips agents with more intelligence to take the right actions, faster.”

SoundHound Pack

Voice AI for customer service and other business needs is both highly in-demand and increasingly crowded with competitors. SoundHound will likely leverage its relatively long history of success and the real-time speed of Intelligent Transcription, but it faces an array of startups and established operators in the field. The list includes rapidly growing startups like voracious acquisition hunter Gupshup, Observe.ai, and PolyAI, as well as big names like Uniphore and Microsoft, who recently debuted a new voice AI contact center built around technology acquired from Nuance.

The business-centric Intelligent Transcription service is also just the latest in SoundHound’s release of new features to match its expansion into more industries. SoundHound launched a new set of tools allowing device manufacturers using SoundHound to decide how much of the voice AI processing happened in the cloud or on the device. The company opened up access to the tools after first bringing them to the table in its long-term Hyundai deal extension and new arrangement with European carmaking giant Stellantis. And Intelligent Transcription may prove a boon for SoundHound’s restaurant clients it has gathered since partnering with payment processor Square and releasing a food service-centered voice AI phone service.

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