Chatbots seem to be everywhere these days, popping up in the corner of our screens. However, although it may feel as if this is still a relatively new phenomenon, the chatbot industry is already evolving. The next iteration will be focused on voice assistants - think Siri or Alexa, but across all kinds of websites, applications, and call centers.
According to Statista, voice assistants will outnumber humans by 2023, with around eight billion units operating globally. Voice integration helps websites and applications become more accessible and provides an additional means of capturing rich insights into your customers, what they're searching for, and pain points in the overall user experience.
Therefore, if you want your business to stay ahead of the competition, moving to voice assistance should form part of your overall digital transformation journey. However, the move doesn't have to be painful. There are already several providers that are leveraging AI technologies to provide voice assistants that can work seamlessly with your existing services. Here are five picks.
Hyro
Typical conversational solutions focus on training text and voice assistants based on user intents and mounds of pre-training data. Hyro takes a different approach, using natural language understanding so its conversational assistants can comprehend and contextualize entire vocabularies. This method creates resilience towards confusion usually caused by tricky synonyms, phrasings, and terminology - it makes it less likely that a conversation will result in communication failure if the customer says something that the AI wouldn't necessarily expect, and means that the product is highly flexible across use cases and industries.
Hyro operates on multiple digital channels, including websites, apps, smart speakers, and call centers. They offer an intuitive "plug-and-play" interface making it seamless to deploy, easy to add conversational touchpoints, and simple to scale up for additional data as needed. They also include a dashboard that turns conversational data into insights to help enterprises better understand customer behavior and inform decision-making.
The company started as a spinout of Cornell Tech in 2018 under the name of Airbud. However, it recently rebranded to Hyro to reflect broader take-up beyond its travel industry roots. Their conversational AI now spans multiple verticals, including healthcare, retail, and finance.
Voca.ai
Voca focuses on contact centers, providing voice-enabled "Virtual Agents" that cover a wide variety of use cases. These include first-line customer support, qualifying sales leads, and debt collection.
Like Hyro, Voca also takes a different approach to training its Virtual Agents, using human voices rather than written text to help the algorithm understand intent. In this way, the Agent learns to identify tone and vocal clues to discern if a customer means something subtly different from what they say.
Voca operates across industries, including banking, insurance, and telecommunications. The company is based in New York and has won several awards including Best in Show at Finovate in Europe in 2019, and in Asia in 2018.
Talkie.ai
Similar to Voca, Talkie also focuses on telephonic voice assistants, offering services in call centers, and for high volume campaigns. However, the sector focus is somewhat different, as Talkie is aimed at the retail and service provider industries.
In the retail sector, Talkie agents can automate many parts of the delivery process, handling customer inquiries about delivery status along with replacements and returns. The company also provides voice agents to a large chain of hair salons, dealing with appointment bookings and inquiries.
Talkie was created by Pragmatists, a software development agency based in Warsaw, Poland. Pragmatists is the same company behind Rightmove, the largest and most popular real estate portal in the United Kingdom.
Speechly
Speechly provides various APIs for developers so that they can integrate voice capabilities into their apps. Speechly aims for multi-modality so that users can deploy a variety of input media depending on the context. For example, ordering takeout from a menu requires a mix of visual cues for selection, and conversation for placing the order and providing the address for delivery.
Speechly operates across a wide variety of use cases and industry sectors. For example, in the e-commerce space, app developers can enable voice-controlled shopping, so customers fill their baskets by stating the items they wish to buy. It can also be integrated into games, so the user interacts with the game using their voice rather than a controller.
The company was founded as Speechgrinder in 2017 and rebranded to Speechly in late 2019. Speechly is based in Helsinki, Finland.
Glia
Glia offers a suite of "digital customer service" solutions that operate across multiple channels, including chat, phone, video, and social channels. However, these are fully integrated so that the customer can seamlessly move between different media and maintain the same conversation even if they're transferred to a different voice assistant.
The company states that decreasing the fragmentation in communication channels increases the chances of a successful sales conversion and reduces the query handling time in contact centers. Glia has a heavy focus on the financial sector, including banking, insurance, lending, and fintech, serving companies including Deutsche Bank and Berkshire Hathaway.
The company is a seven-time Best in Show Award winner at Finovate Europe. Glia is based in New York City and has been operating since 2012.
The broad range of services available from voice bot providers is a sure indicator that the move to voice is already underway. Businesses can leverage providers like the ones listed here to make their services more accessible to a wider audience and gather meaningful insights from voice interactions. Perhaps most importantly, staying ahead of the move to voice and the benefits it brings means maintaining an edge over the competition.
