Messenger's back and Unicorn facts CAI & NLP 012
Kane Simms
??Triple Award-Winning AI Automation Consultancy ?? VUX. helps businesses leverage AI… Properly.
This week... Over $500m raised, and an AI-first unicorn. A selection of new use cases, plenty of which include Facebook Messenger. Is Messenger back? More insights from VUX World than you can consume in an average lunch break. NVIDIA launches new research into conversational AI in banking. New partnership announcements (does Mercedes have a new voice assistant?). Plenty of knowledge being dropped, events that you can't miss and a question on whether AI should be able to fire people...
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Presented by Symbl.ai and Deepgram
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Funding
Uniphore announced Wednesday that it had raised $400 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. It's the most funding raised by a call centre AI startup and makes Uniphore a unicorn. I ask the question: is the next Instagram, Uber, Airbnb; an AI company in customer service?
We're continuing to see backing on the digital human front after Synthesia raised $50m in December. The world of virtual avatars and digital humans is just getting started. Expect to see them on the next Hype Cycle.
SKAEL combines conversational AI and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automate workflows and improve customer experience. It uses the term 'digital employees', rather than 'conversational AI', a positioning angle that Amelia has used consistently. SKAEL focuses on the time employees can save when AI automates the mundane, and its new funding will fuel growth into this space.
New releases
It's not a terrible interface. Pretty basic. The worst part about it is how poor the speech to text is. I transcribed a podcast and the word error rate was astonishing. Probably my accent.
LivePerson has announced a bunch of new features that it hopes will bring about a more 'Curiously Human' level of customer experience with chatbots.?I wrote more about that here.
Use cases
PolicyBazaar, one of India's largest online marketplaces for insurance, has launched its AI-enabled WhatsApp chatbot to automate and expedite the claim settlement process for all its corporate clients.
From Voicebot:
"The Las Vegas Raiders have debuted a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to communicate with fans. The team built the new AI in a partnership with GameOn Technology, which has developed similar services for other sports franchises."
From FinExtra:
"Russia's VTB is anticipating a 30% uplift in call centre automation following the introduction of a voice assistant that can anticipate client demands."
"Initially operating in pilot mode, the VTB voice assistant will not only identify the client at the time of the call, but also analyse their history of interaction with the bank, including previous requests. The system will form a suggestion of what the current query is related to, and immediately after the greeting, it will clarify the request with the client, for example, the amount owed on a loan."
Another Facebook Messenger launch. I thought that was dying a slow death, but apparently not.
How's this for some outcomes:
Decathlon uses Hootsuite and chose to use HeyDay for its Facebook Messenger bot. Hootsuite acquired HeyDay in August 2021 for $48m for exactly this reason: to sell into its current customer base a 'proprietary' solution to increase LTV of customers, and keep customers in its ecosystem. Smart move.
Insights
From Verdict:
Key takeaways:
领英推荐
Knowledge
A piece inspired by the conversation I had with Bobby Bryant, CEO, DOSS last week about the missing ingredient in most voice assistants and voice user interfaces. An ingredient without which, the whole thing is pointless.
Partnerships
Twilio?is integrating?LumenVox’s speech and voice recognition technology into its own cloud communications platform. The company is specifically hoping to enhance the utility of the platform’s Voice and Flex offerings, and believes that LumenVox’s Speech Experience will lead to better outcomes for clients and their individual end users.
You might be familiar with Sonantic from last week: the Valentine's Day voice over. Perhaps you heard the Val Kilmer story. Both Sonantic.
And it's now powering the voice of the latest Hey Mercedes assistant built into the prototype car,?Vision EQXX.
So, it's not actually powering the real Hey Mercedes assistant just yet, but it's a vision for the future of how voice assistants will sound.?
Events coming up
If you'd like to learn more about how to utilise Google CCAI in your contact centre, join me and Servion on March 9th. I'll take a deep dive into some specific nuances that you need to consider when thinking about call centre automation and Larry Hitchcock will show you how to build your first bot.
Disruptel really is building the future of voice assistants. Imagine being able to ask your TV things like "How tall is the guy on the left?" and get an answer. Or ask "What's that jacket James Bond is wearing?" and be able to buy the exact same jacket right there and then from your sofa.
Well, that's what Disruptel is building. Voice assistants that can see, sell and much more.
Advised by the legendary creator of Apple Siri and Samsung Bixby, Adam Cheyer, the potential of Disruptel is, well, disruptive... And huge.
We're joined on Wednesday (today) by CEO Alex Quinn to hear about the vision for Disruptel, the use cases it enables and the future of voice assistants that can see.
We'll be chatting to the Voxable team, Matt Buck and Lauren Golembiewski, about the past, present and future of conversation design on Thursday.
Where’s conversation design headed? Is technology taking over, making designers redundant? Will technology like?GPT-3 make a designer's life easier? How has the role of conversation design evolved over the years and what’s?going to change or remain in future? Join Voxable’s Matt Buck and Lauren Golembiewski to dive deep into the?future of conversation design.
Some things to think about:?
What jobs should we give to AI? How about the ability to judge how good you are at your job, and make some decision about whether you should continue to have your job, should you not be doing your job as good as you should?
Check out SpeeChin. A camera that recognises what you're saying by using image recognition to match the pattern your chin makes when you're talking to the words you're saying.?
Now, the thing only recognises about 50 words in English and another 50 or so in Chinese and has a 90% accuracy rate. Also, results vary wildly depending on whether the subject is moving or not.?
Yep, you're right, it's complete nonesense that likely won't go any further than this, but it's a cool little story and does at least have its roots in a real challenge: getting the speed and UX benefits of voice user interfaces while in situations where speaking is prohibitive.?
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VUX World is the front door to the world of AI-powered customer experience, helping business leaders and teams understand why voice, conversational AI and NLP technologies are revolutionising how we live, work and get things done.
We help executives formulate the future of customer experience strategies and guide teams in designing, building and implementing revolutionary products and services built on emerging AI and NLP technologies.
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