Signal
Athens-based customer service startup Omilia’s CEO Dimitris Vassos emphasized in a TechCrunch interview that new-age startups like Sierra and Decagon, which have raised millions of dollars in investment, might be deploying too much generative AI and burning through their cash.
His view was that there are a lot of customer service operations that could be automated without deploying AI. Amid the tokenomics debate going on in the tech industry, customer service companies will have to start talking about the cost of automation, rather than the number of calls or tickets they have automated.
In Focus
Boson AI’s quick sprint to its speech-to-speech model, and its avatar-based future
In July, Boson AI announced a big funding round of $70 million, which was originally closed in 2023, to develop new models and deploy its tech to enterprises. Last week, the company released its speech-to-speech model with a claimed latency of 700ms. The model costs $0.0023/min for audio input and $0.014/min for audio output.
The three-year-old startup said that it worked on pre-processing millions of hours of audio data to make the new model efficiently compete with the likes of OpenAI Realtime and Google Gemini Flash.
“Audio itself is fairly cheap. The problem is, this is unannotated audio. We have spent a substantial amount of time to enrich that with the appropriate metadata to give us very high-quality models. Our smaller models are trained on about 10 million hours of data, and for the larger ones, we have about 100 million hours of trainable data available,” CEO Alex Smola, a former AWS scientist, told me over a call.
The company has its own system teams to build a small data center to reduce costs.
“If we were to employ the likes of Scale AI for pre-processing, we couldn't do that as a startup. This is a game that very large, very rich companies can play. As a startup, you have to use math rather than money,” Smola said.
Demo
I got the demo of the company’s newest model, and the conversation bit was very good, and the model seems to handle interruptions well. Though there were a few hiccups, the search tool or API the company was using seemed outdated, as when Smola inquired about Google’s exec team shake-up, the machine wasn’t able to answer that. The second hiccup was when I asked it to pronounce my name as (ee-wan) instead of (eye-wan); it wasn’t able to do that either.
The first problem seems fixable. However, the company would need to fix the second problem for enterprise deployment, as customers can get angry if the system doesn’t pronounce their name in the right way.
Avatars
The company is moving towards avatars and is testing the technology on its API. Smola took a screenshot of me and made a quick avatar, which spoke in an American accent. To me, it was weird and uncanny, but the speech and lip movements were clear. Smola thinks that avatar can be deployed wherever there can be better user engagement.
The company is fighting on many fronts with enterprise deployment and model development. It wants to take on customer service and voice agent companies with its new speech-to-speech models, and it also wants to take on the likes of HeyGen and Synthesia to expand into avatars.
Experiments
I talked about Vocci’s meeting notetaking ring and in-person meeting notetaking etiquette last week. Days after writing that, I got my Pebble Index 01 ring. The ring is very simple with a microphone and a button. The core idea is to press the button and take notes or set reminders, and I very much like this narrow functionality.
The ring is comfortable to wear, and the gesture of pressing the button to take a note is intuitive. Unlike Vocci, you can send your reminders directly to system defaults like Apple Reminders and organize them later. Given that you can only record while the button is pressed, it is not meant to record meetings.
In my early testing, I was able to record notes in loud environments and also whisper to the ring in a low voice when I was in quiet places like cabs. I think the ring form factor for notetaking might find its own niche.
There are some additional functionalities like double-press to invoke search or an MCP server. One thing I noticed was that Wispr Flow was the ring’s official cloud processing partner. The transcription company seems to be getting into supporting different devices like the Index 01 and the Oasis ring.
Numbers game
A report by Truecaller suggested that 76% of respondents prefer to talk to businesses over a call. This suggests a big and growing opportunity in India to automate these calls.
Indiamart, a B2B online marketplace, said in its recent earnings report that it has automated a call volume of 100,000 daily calls.
Quick Bytes
Gen AI music company Suno’s list of lawsuits is rising, and the company wants to do damage control by adopting measures to let streaming platforms mark songs generated on its platform. The company’s co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman made it clear that Suno doesn’t want to pass a creative judgement on people using AI to create music.
EU is now asking all companies to disclose their AI system that might interact with humans. This will impact all customer service companies, along with AI avatar companies that work for training and marketing.
As I wrote in my scoop about Wispr’s notetaker launch, the company eventually wants to build a full-fledged voice-operated assistant. Launching a meeting notetaker means that it can gather more context about users, and also help them complete tasks.
Bloomberg reported that hackers used voice-phishing to try and steal information from Point72 Asset Management, Millennium Management, Two Sigma Investments, and Citadel. As more “human-sounding” models hit the market, hackers will try to use them to trick people and companies.
This is a new benchmark for Indian languages and conditions, which is good for primary model evaluations, but when it comes to deployment, enterprises don’t often look at benchmarks. Mostly because there are so many of them around.
Deals corner
Omilia ($67 million): The Athens-based CX company raised its second-ever round, as it has reached the scale of 3 billion calls per year. The company is finding a footing in areas like quick-service food chains with clients like Taco Bell
Investors: Expedition Growth Capital (lead)
HappyRobot ($67 million): Another CX funding this week was more focused on infrastructure company HappyRobot, which reached a $1.2 billion valuation. The company has clients like DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, Naturgy, Repsol, and Uber.
Investors: Prysm Capital (lead), Eurazeo (co-lead), a16z.
Edit Note (August 17): The story was updated to reflect that Boson raised its round in 2023.
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This newsletter is by Ivan Mehta, a freelance reporter at TechCrunch. It covers AI and technology in voice, audio, and music. Email: voiceaiweek@gmail.com or im@ivanmehta.com