Conversational AI is on the rise!
We’re thrilled to bring you the latest updates and insights into the world of AI-powered conversations. In this issue, we’ll dive into some fascinating topics that are shaping the landscape of conversational AI. One of the most notable trends we are seeing is the remarkable rise of large language models (LLMs). These sophisticated models, have gained significant attention and are revolutionizing the way we interact with AI. We’ll take a closer look at their capabilities, potential applications, and the impact they are having across industries.
Investment/Partnership Deals
Hyro, a conversational AI startup catering to enterprises, has successfully raised $20 million in a recent funding round. Founded in 2018, Hyro is a plug-and-play startup providing AI tools for various sectors, with a particular focus on healthcare. Macquarie Capital led the funding round, joined by new investors Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Black Opal Ventures, and K20, as well as existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spero Ventures, and Mindset Ventures.The capital raised will be utilized to expand their offerings for healthcare providers, including scheduling, prescription management, and lead generation, through strategic partnerships and integrations, while also expanding their team.
Cyara, a leader in Customer Experience (CX) Assurance, has integrated OpenAI’s GPT-3 to enhance the training and testing process for its chatbot and conversational AI CX testing solution called Cyara Botium. This integration allows enterprises to accelerate the development of their chatbots and voicebots while simultaneously improving their quality. By leveraging GPT-3, Cyara Botium generates a meaningful list of user examples specific to the chatbot’s programmed domain, thereby reducing the time and labor required for developing training and testing data. This integration enhances the speed, quality, and test coverage of chatbot development, enabling enterprises to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Cyara’s AI-powered Data and Test Generator, built on the OpenAI GPT-3 integration, is now available for their enterprise customers.
Cognigy, a leading Enterprise Conversational AI (CAI) provider, has formed a strategic reseller partnership with Black Box, a prominent Global Solutions Integrator (GSI), to accelerate the deployment of conversational AI solutions in enterprise contact centers. By combining Cognigy’s enterprise-class Conversational AI technology with Black Box’s extensive CX solution practice and network of CX professionals, the partnership aims to deliver powerful AI-based solutions that enhance customer experiences. The collaboration will enable businesses to automate routine customer interactions, freeing up contact center agents to handle more complex issues and provide personalized support. This results in increased automation, efficiency, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. With AI-powered virtual assistants available 24/7, customers can enjoy faster and more convenient service. Together, Cognigy and Black Box offer the expertise and technology to help businesses strengthen customer relationships and achieve better business outcomes by transforming their customer service delivery across all channels.
Holographic display provider Proto has teamed up with enterprise conversational AI developer CodeBaby to blend their technologies into three-dimensional AI avatars for businesses to use in areas like customer service, education, and entertainment. Proto is known for high-definition hologram generators and related operating systems. The 3D videos and communications supported by the technology are used in business, entertainment, and education to portray imaginary characters and real people. Codebaby supplies virtual beings for customer service using conversational AI. The company has begun experimenting with employing generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Their overarching goal is to bring a visual component to conversational AI and generative AI. The two are combining their products, starting with a holographic customer service avatar that can be used to answer customer questions and resolve issues. The avatar will be able to understand and respond to natural language queries, and it will be able to access and process information from Proto’s holographic database. This collaboration is a major step forward in our mission to make conversational AI more accessible and engaging.
Character.AI, a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform, has entered into a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to develop the next generation of conversational AI. As part of the collaboration, Google Cloud has been chosen as the preferred cloud infrastructure for Character.AI’s advanced AI models, enabling sophisticated reasoning and improved accuracy. Leveraging the advancements in generative AI and large language models (LLMs), Character.AI aims to provide consumers with personalized superintelligence. By combining their own AI capabilities with Google Cloud’s generative AI and LLM infrastructure, Character.AI will enhance the customer experience, fostering imagination, discovery, and understanding. This partnership signifies the growing importance of generative AI in revolutionizing natural language processing and text generation tasks.
Moveworks, the leading conversational AI platform for the enterprise, has announced a strategic partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp., a trusted government IT solutions provider, to bring conversational AI to the public sector. As the Master Government Aggregator®, Carahsoft will make Moveworks’ secure and trusted conversational AI platform for employee support available through its reseller partners and Information Technology Enterprise Solutions. Moveworks’ expertise in deploying conversational AI in Microsoft Government Community Cloud High (GCC-H) Teams ensures compliance, security, and scalability for the public sector’s needs. By partnering with Carahsoft, Moveworks aims to deliver the power of conversational AI innovations to enhance efficiency and user experience without compromising the high security standards required by government agencies. With Carahsoft’s extensive experience in supporting public sector agencies, this collaboration ensures readiness and trustworthiness in serving the government and its workforce, making conversational AI accessible through natural language while maintaining stringent security and compliance measures.
New product features, highlights & use cases
Salesforce has introduced Slack GPT, a conversational AI experience integrated into Slack. This innovative tool allows users to harness generative AI app integrations, language models, and secure customer data insights from Customer 360 and Data Cloud. With Slack GPT, users can benefit from AI-powered conversation summaries, writing assistance, and the ability to create no-code workflows with embedded AI actions. The purpose-built native capabilities of Slack GPT make it a powerful AI tool. In the future, customers can look forward to conversation summarization, enhanced communication, and integration of generative AI apps like ChatGPT and Claude. While the ChatGPT app for Slack is currently in beta, workflow builder with Slack GPT AI connectors is set to be released later this year.
Belong.Life has launched Dave, the world’s first real-time conversational AI oncology mentor for cancer patients. Dave is built on a conversational AI platform that utilizes deep learning and training on vast amounts of anonymized patient data accumulated over seven years. With the aim of improving access to quality cancer care, Dave provides personalized and instant support to patients and their families. Belong.Life plans to develop similar conversational AI mentors for other health indications. Dave’s advanced capabilities, developed through machine learning, NLP, and classification techniques, enable it to offer precise, comprehensive, and empathetic answers to cancer patients’ challenges. The platform ensures continuous communication and retains a long-term memory of previous interactions. This milestone signifies Belong.Life’s commitment to transforming the healthcare industry through conversational AI technology.
Vectara, an AI-powered conversational search platform, has unveiled new capabilities aimed at enhancing generative AI for business data. Originally branded as a neural search-as-a-service technology, Vectara combines large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), data integration pipelines, and vector techniques to create an optimized neural network for search. The company is expanding its offerings to include generative AI, enabling result summarization for a more conversational AI experience. Additionally, Vectara is introducing “grounded generation” capabilities to minimize the risk of AI hallucinations and enhance search accuracy. Alongside these advancements, Vectara has successfully raised $28.5 million in a seed funding round, led by Race Capital, with the participation of industry experts such as Matei Zaharia, the CTO of Databricks, joining their strategic board of advisors.
Metaview, the leading AI recruiting-tech company backed by VVUS, Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, and Village Global, has introduced Answers, the world’s first conversational AI designed specifically for the interview process. With the release of a large language model (LLM)-based chat interface, recruiters now have the power to ask questions about candidates in their pipeline and instantly receive comprehensive summaries, precise data points, and valuable insights derived from interview discussions. Leveraging cutting-edge advancements in LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Metaview’s groundbreaking feature empowers recruiters with instant access to crucial candidate information shared during interviews. Recruiters can effortlessly inquire about candidates, and Metaview’s AI assistant promptly retrieves relevant responses based on interview conversations. As a result, recruiters experience heightened productivity and efficiency, saving an average of 5–10 hours per week while reducing time to hire by an impressive 20% through the facilitation of higher-quality interviews.
Industry Trends
In the recently released Reinventing Enterprise Operations report by Accenture, it has been revealed that an overwhelming 90% of business leaders are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their operational resilience. The report, based on a survey of 1,700 executives from 1,657 organizations across various industries and countries, highlights the growing importance of AI in driving operational maturity. Notably, 73% of companies are prioritizing AI over other digital investments, emphasizing its significance in business strategies. Accenture also predicts that generative AI will play a substantial role, potentially supporting or augmenting up to 40% of working hours in the near future.