Welcome to the February newsletter on #ConversationalAI! As the world becomes increasingly digitized, businesses are turning to bots, virtual agents, and messaging methods to interact with customers. While these technologies add efficiency, they can also dehumanize customer conversations. However, the latest updates in the field of conversational AI are bringing exciting news and advancements to this space. With the recent buzz around Google Bard, ChatGPT we can see that the industry is constantly evolving and improving. In this newsletter, we’ll explore the latest trends and innovations in conversational AI and how they are transforming the way businesses engage with their customers. Let’s dive in!
Investment/Partnership Deals
Unith, the leading tech developer has received firm commitments to raise $4.5 million to advance its ChatGPT-driven conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology.This significant investment will be utilized to enhance the conversational AI features in Unith’s Talking Head platform, which aims to improve the efficiency of software for both end-users and clients. At the forefront of the digital avatar technology, Unith has developed digital avatars that can engage in real-time with any audience and is currently the only company in this sector on the ASX. The company has recently been beta testing the integration of ChatGPT with its ‘digital human’ AI.
Conversational artificial intelligence provider, Uniphore has acquired the U.K.-based voice, screen, and metadata capturing company Red Box. The acquisition enabled Uniphore to add Red Box’s capturing capabilities to its conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform. This acquisition has expanded Uniphore’s conversational AI platform by incorporating Red Box’s capturing capabilities, which are particularly useful in compliance-focused industries like healthcare and financial services. With the ability to capture conversations in real-time or post-call audio and metadata streams, companies can now easily monitor and identify any activity that could potentially violate organizational or industry regulations or policies.
Vestigo Ventures invested in Knowbl Enterprise-Ready Conversational AI Platform that enhances the power of traditional large language models (LLM) used by GPT-like services with Knowbl’s patents to speed up adoption of the experience by enterprises at scale. Knowbl’s platform accesses brand-specific, compliance-approved content directly from an enterprise’s own ground truths, thus overcoming the drawbacks of potential inaccuracies found in traditional chatbots. Knowbl’s patent-pending technology enhances the power of large language models like GPT, delivering an intelligent and human-like virtual concierge experience. By leveraging content housed behind the firewall, the platform can connect with existing knowledge bases and CRMs, as well as website and file uploads. This creates a positive and meaningful customer experience that can help grow revenue. Vestigo Ventures led the seed funding round, with several limited partners seeking direct investment in Knowbl. With this investment, Knowbl is poised to revolutionize the conversational AI space and provide enterprises with a new level of confidence in their customer interactions.
Uniphore Technologies Inc. has acquired Hexagone, a France-based company, that specializes in combining voice, video, and text-based data to offer AI-based insights that aid in understanding human behavior and sentiment. This acquisition enhances Uniphore’s existing emotion detection capabilities, thereby expanding its innovation portfolio, which already includes emotion AI, no code/low code development, and knowledge AI. By leveraging behavioral analytics, Uniphore’s platform can provide more accurate and empathetic interactions, allowing for better customer experiences.
New product features, highlights & use cases
Google, the king of search engines, announced that it is making its own conversational AI, Bard, available to “trusted testers” ahead of a wider release to the public in the coming weeks. Bard is a generative and conversational AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT and Bing Chat, that can help with creative tasks, explaining complex topics, and distilling information from various sources on the internet. Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
LivePerson, a global leader in AI-powered customer engagement, announced enhancements to its industry-leading Conversational Cloud platform. The new upgrades are designed to allow the safe and productive use of Generative AI within the platform’s trusted Conversational AI platform, including Knowledge AI, Conversation Assist, and Agent Productivity tools. These enhancements are geared towards enabling call center agents to successfully resolve every customer query or complaint, while also providing live supervisor coaching and automated actions for after-call work.
Observe.AI is a provider of artificial intelligence-based call center software that aids human operators with customer service tasks. It has launched a Real-Time AI product suite to aid call center agents in improving customer interactions. The suite provides live guidance during calls, based on both real-time and historical data, to help agents resolve customer queries and receive coaching. The guidance is presented as “Dynamic Prompts” on the agent’s screen.
Dealtale, the leader in causal AI for marketers, announced the First Conversational AI Technology for Performance Marketing Analytics. Known as Marketing Co-pilot, this ChatGPT-like feature allows marketers to ask complex queries regarding their past, present, and future performance metrics, and instantly receive accurate answers based on data from various sources, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and social media channels. This powerful tool is designed to aid marketers of all levels, from marketing managers to CMOs, in making informed strategic decisions. For instance, a demand generation marketer can inquire about the reasons for certain segments underperforming, while a digital marketer can identify gaps in the customer journey. Dealtale’s Marketing Co-pilot is an exceptional tool that will revolutionize the way marketers approach performance analysis.
Yext, Inc.,a New York City technology company operating in the area of online brand management, announced the launch of Yext Chat, allowing businesses to create conversational experiences with AI using multiple large language models, including GPT-3, and the Yext Knowledge Graph. Yext, helps organizations answer every question about their business. Yext Chat provides accurate and natural language chat experiences by referencing curated sets of knowledge, which is optimized by the Knowledge Graph — a CMS that uses entity relationships to optimize content for voice search, chatbots, and AI. This allows businesses to confirm that responses are accurate and grounded in real-world information. With Search Term Clustering and robust analytics, Yext customers can easily identify and fill content gaps, creating a flywheel for continual improvement of the Yext Chat experience.
Enterprise conversational AI platform Yellow.ai has introduced a Dynamic Conversation Designer tool that employs generative AI to simplify the design of voice or text-based conversational AI. The tool automates the development process and syncs with the design, enabling developers to apply generative AI for voice effects and allowing real-time collaboration between designers and developers. Yellow claims that the Dynamic Conversation Designer can cut development time in half by replacing the usual method of starting with design flowcharts and then moving on to development. The tool also enables designers to brainstorm, extrapolate from existing templates, and spot possible errors in the program for future updates.
The Glimpse Group, Inc., a diversified Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) company providing enterprise focused immersive technology software and services solutions, announced that its subsidiary company, Foretell Reality, has integrated conversational artificial intelligence (AI) into their virtual reality platform. This new feature could completely transform the way users interact and engage in virtual environments across multiple industries, such as healthcare, education, training, and marketing. By utilizing GPT-3, the conversational AI feature enables virtual reality experiences to respond to natural language inputs from users. This means that users can have lifelike and realistic conversations with virtual characters on the Foretell VR platform, providing a higher level of engagement and a more immersive experience.
You.com, a search engine startup based in San Francisco, has announced the launch of YouChat 2.0, a new conversational AI system that promises to revolutionize the internet search experience. This update represents a significant advancement in the evolution of web search, providing a glimpse into how we’ll interact with information and the internet in the future. YouChat 2.0 is the first web search engine to combine sophisticated conversational AI with community-built apps, delivering a unique and interactive experience with every query. Using its C-A-L (Chat, Apps, and Links) blended language model, YouChat 2.0 can display charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text, or code embedded in its responses to user inquiries. As a result, users can access all the information they need without having to open multiple tabs, ensuring they stay focused on their search engine.
Industry Trends
The conversational AI market is expected to experience significant growth in the coming years, with a projected CAGR of 22.2% from 2022 to 2030, reaching a total value of USD 41,890 million by the end of the forecast period. This growth will be driven primarily by the increasing demand for enhanced customer support across several industries, including media and entertainment, BFSI, and travel, which will lead to a higher CAGR of 23.1% in the service category. One of the fastest-growing categories within conversational AI will be personal assistants, as businesses increasingly seek to provide personalized customer services that can understand open conversations and transform them as per the needs of users. Additionally, customer support is expected to remain the largest application of conversational AI technology in the future, driven by the growing adoption of IVAs and chatbots that can provide round-the-clock, automated consumer support. ~ P&S Intelligence