Another big week as 2022 draws near. CAI and NLP 005

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Anyway, fancy a chat? Join me at voice lunch this Thursday for a chat about the biggest trends in AI we saw in 2021 and what to expect in 2022.

It's nothing formal. More of a networking session where we can spend some time together and exchange ideas.

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News

Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance is under threat

Remember back in a snowy April , when we were all shocked and excited about Microsoft's $20bn acquisition of Nuance ?

Well, the deal's hit a little snag .

There's concerns that the deal would give Microsoft an unfair advantage in the healthcare space and potentially prevent new entrants from competing in that market.

Nuance provide AI services for 77% of hostpitals in the US, and power a large part of the NHS voice services, so these concerns seem to stack up.

However, the US and Australian powers that be have already given the deal the OK. All that's left is for the EU Commission to review the case and make a decision, which it intends to do by 21st December.

What a nervous Christmas for the Microsoft and Nuance teams.

Amazon AWS outage

I'm sure you already know about this. You were probably effected, so I won't reopen that wound too much. But, basically, AWS went down last week and wreaked havoc on a whole bunch of apps and services, including Alexa and a whole load of others, both Amazon-owned and third party. Even Disney+ went down as a result.

Awards

SoundHound named Company of the Year

"This Year's Best Practices Company of the Year in the North American Automotive Connected Voice Assistance Industry Award goes to SoundHound Inc."

Big congratulations to the SoundHound team. It's had such a great year and finishing it so strongly. First, the announcement that it'll be going public in early 2022, and now this. All the best.

New releases

Microsoft voice control for Windows 11

Microsoft, in the Windows Insider Dev channel, has rolled out an update that allows you to control Windows 11 with your voice.

It’s called voice access and it's similar to the voice control feature available on iOS (weirdly, not branded as part of the ‘Siri’ functionality,?which I’ve moaned about before ).

It’s branded as an accessibility feature, like Apple, but the reality is that using your voice to navigate your computer is a bonus for everyone.?

It also runs on device and doesn’t require an internet connection to use.?

The worst part about this is the ‘wake word’ detection . You can enable voice access by using your voice, but you have to say “voice access wake up” or “unmute”. To turn it off, say “voice access sleep” or “mute”. That's just weird.?Not memorable and requires a bit of cognition to remember.

"Amazon Alexa is shutting down… Shocking!"

That’s the worst, click-baity headline I’ve ever read. So ridiculous that I’m not even going to link to the article it comes from.?

Alexa isn’t shutting down.?Alexa.com ?is.?

Amazon acquired web traffic analytics company in 1999 for $250m and has been winding it down for a while, stopping it’s web search feature in 2008 and now shutting the site down completely. I imagine we’ll see that domain name used for something else??

If you want to read more, this article is a more balanced explanation.

Amazon Connect gets new transcription and analysis tool

Contact Lens , a virtual call center product for Amazon Connect that transcribes calls while simultaneously assessing them, now features call summarization. Enabled by default, Contact Lens provides a transcript of all calls made via Connect, Amazon’s cloud contact center service.

Funding

Suki raises $55m

Voice-enabled healthcare digital assistant?Suki ?just banked $55 million in series C funding, boosting its valuation to $400 million.?

It integrates with EHR systems which is a big plus. Suki says its solution reduces documentation time by 76%, on average, and is used by physicians across dozens of specialties in more than 90 health systems and clinics nationwide.

Synthesia raises $50m

Synthetic avatar video creator, Synthesia, has just raised $50m to scale its corporate synthetic avatar platform.

With Synthesia, you can create videos that feature realistic avatars speaking your script, or presenting your slide deck, with decent TTS in minutes, without the need for physical or voice actors.

What's even more impressive is the team of people Synthesia has managed to bring on board. Des Traynor, co-founder of?Intercom.io , Christian Reber, co-founder of?Pitch.com , Andrey Khusid, co-founder of?Miro.com , Anne Raimondi, COO of?Asana.com and the two founders of Stripe.com .

Big congrats to Victor Riparbelli and the team.

Posh Technologies raises $27.5m to fuel call centre automation.

This is another example of a trend we've seen throughout 2021, with chat-native platforms backing their way into the voice channel, similar to?Yellow.ai ?and many others.

With voice, it is different to chat, and it's not always a case of throwing TTS on the front of your NLU. Native voice-first companies like Speakeasy and others have an edge, but it’ll be interesting to see which of these chat platforms thrive in the voice world.?

Unique raises $6m for AI-driven videos calls platform aimed at sales teams.

Unique isn't anything scary like an automated platform for making outbound video sales calls. It's actually a lot more subtle than that. The technology analyses video and audio to extract insights for sales teams to help them figure out which parts of their pitch works best, so that they can improve.?

Partnerships

Dubber and Optus to launch mobile voice recording for enterprise services

Delivered as?Optus Mobile Voice Recording and AI - powered by Dubber, the product represents an Australian first, with Dubber Unified Call recording and AI available as a native feature of the Optus mobile network. As a result, enterprise customers on Optus now have access to a cost-effective and complete recording and conversational insights solution across virtually any form of communication.

The AI part? Transcriptions and sentiment analysis.

Are branded synthetic voices finally on their way?

Five9 and Well Said Labs announce synthetic voice partnership and Veritone and Vixen Labs announce the same.

Following the Readspeaker and SoundHound partnership , and the VUI Agency and VocalID partnership , from earlier in the year, these two new announcements show further activity in the branded voice space.

There's no doubt that branded custom voices are on their way. When your interface is an audio interface, then all you have to differentiate on is the sound of the voice speaking.

The issue at the moment, is that most organisations are just wrapping their head around what’s possible from an automation perspective in the first place, and haven’t got to thinking about the sonic part yet. We’ve been talking about the importance of it since 2018 , but brands just haven’t caught up.

Hopefully, with this rejuvenated interest from the CX vendor and agency side, we’ll see some solutions sold and case studies created over the next year.?

Events

Two great discussions happening for you this week. On Tuesday (today), we're chatting to WhoElse.ai on the future of an open voice web. Register here.

And, on Wednesday, we're chatting to Moxie about how to design conversations and multimodal AI experiences for robots. Register here.

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