Bengaluru and California-based voice AI platform Observe.ai has raised around ₹56 crores ($8 million) in series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, along with MGV, Liquid 2 Ventures, Hack VC, and existing investors including Emergent Ventures and Y Combinator.
Observe.ai was founded by Akash Singh, Sharath Keshava and Swapnil Jain in 2017. It assists call centre agents with their job through its voice AI platform, that provides real-time feedback on customer sentiment and advises them on next best action during the call.
The platform listens to the incoming calls in real-time and uses deep learning and natural language processing to understand the context and generate suggestions.
This will really benefit the call centre agents as they won’t have to waste time looking for solutions elsewhere when it will be available right in front of them in real-time. It will also increase the agent’s efficiency, along with quicker resolutions for customers and reducing unnecessary costs.
Ram Gupta, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, said, “Companies have been actively discouraging their customers to call their agents for the last two decades because of increasing costs even though it is a natural way for humans to get help. With the recent advances in deep learning and NLP, which will dramatically increase the productivity of agents, call centres are ready to become the first port of contact again for customer service.”
The startup claims to be working with one of the largest call centres in the US. It had recently partnered with Talkdesk, to launch its provide support to all Talkdesk customers through its voice AI platform, to help improve customer satisfaction.
The artificial intelligence market was worth $16.06 billion in 2017, and it is expected to be worth $190 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 36.62%. There are opportunities to be created in this domain, as companies look to automate their tasks and cut costs to increase efficiencies, in a highly competitive ecosystem.