SoundHound Debuts Generative AI Answering Service for Businesses

SoundHound has introduced a generative AI-powered voice assistant to answer incoming phone calls for businesses. The new Smart Answering service expands SoundHound’s latest voice AI setup to automate interactions with customers, mimicking human voices and language to answer their questions.

Smart Answering AI

The Smart Answering Service melds SoundHound’s speech recognition and natural language processing with its generative AI models. The AI is trained on the website and other knowledge bases provided by the company to give relevant, conversational replies to callers. It can match customer queries with answers from the company website, custom responses, or take actions like sending SMS links, taking messages, or transferring calls.

The AI is handling more than 500 calls per month for SoundHound’s current clients and works as well as or better than human employees, according to the company. As a result, the Smart Answering service frees up employees who may have spent a lot of time on routine calls. beforehand To accelerate adoption, SoundHound will soon launch a self-service portal to make integration even faster. This will allow companies to get the AI call answering system up and running in minutes.

“By implementing Smart Answering, our cashiers are able to focus on live customers without having issues with multitasking,” Tadeh Ghazalian, owner of Dialog Cafe in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “With labor becoming the biggest challenge, the SoundHound’s AI has been able to answer the majority of customer inquiries – and it’s actually crazy how much better it has become over time.”

SoundHound’s new feature is reminiscent of Google’s Calljoy, an experiment from its Area 120 labs that offered voice AI for small business services before it shut down in July of 2020. SoundHound has been aggressively widening its reach of late, fueled by a recent $100 million in strategic funding. The company has been working on a long-term strategy built on partnerships like White Castle and new tools and features for its restaurant and automotive clients. That includes generative AI and Dynamic Interaction voice AI for business services. SoundHound previously predicted it would reach profitability and raised $25 million in equity financing in January after reducing staff from around 450 to 200 people in two rounds of layoffs. SoundHound has ambitions for its generative AI voice assistants, with a goal of making an “AI at Every Ear” future where voice intelligence augments human ability.