Companies with heavy customer-facing operations may be lagging when it comes to making the best use out of artificial intelligence, particularly if they are smaller companies. This is unfortunate; small businesses are in a position to benefit a lot from AI, primarily because they are often not well staffed enough to match a human agent to every incoming query.
That said, Voice AI company SoundHound AI, Inc. has announced that its fully automated Smart Answering service is now available to a wider variety of businesses, thanks to a subscription version of the product. The subscription service uses SoundHound’s voice AI, combining software engineering and generative AI to handle inbound customer calls instantly and accurately. SoundHound Smart Answering was designed to help businesses optimize human labor by relieving employees of the burden of answering calls so they can focus on more business-critical tasks.
Smart Answering extends SoundHound’s popular customer service offering to enable businesses in any industry to set up a fully automated, AI-driven call answering service within minutes at a reasonable cost, said the company. Using generative AI, the Smart Answering system reads and integrates company website information in order to update its AI Knowledge Base. It then uses SoundHound’s advanced speech recognition and natural language understanding to give tailored, conversational responses to customer phone queries.
“Businesses across the country are stretched,” said Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and cofounder of SoundHound, in a statement. “They’re finding it difficult to attract, train and keep employees amid labor shortages, but they still have high standards when it comes to customer service. Smart Answering uses our sophisticated voice technology in combination with generative AI to answer 100% of calls and provide fast, accurate answers from an AI agent that we envision customers will ultimately prefer to any other method. We’re also able to onboard businesses within minutes. For many, it will be a game-changer.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
