Telecom giant Bharati Airtel announced on Thursday it has acquired 10% stake in conversational AI startup Voicezen. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. This deal has been made under Airtel Startup Accelerator Program, which was started last year.
Gurugram headquartered Voicezen essentially leverages the power of machine learning, AI, speech to text and voice technologies to provide real time analytics to help brands serve customers better.
This is probably first time that the Gurgaon based startup has raised funds from external investors.
The investment will enable Airtel to capitalize on Voicezen’s technologies, which can be deployed across its customer touch points in multiple languages, an official statement offered by the company said.
These technological solutions will help Airtel to make its conversation with customers smoother, frictionless and enable faster resolution of their problems/complaints.
Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer Bharti Airtel said “Voicezen has built some promising products that are very relevant for a market like India. We are delighted to welcome them to the Airtel Startup Accelerator Program and look forward to partnering them in scaling these innovative ‘Made in India, for India’ applications and implement them in the real world.”
Commenting on Airtel’s investment, Apurba Nath, Founder Voicezen said “Voicezen helps brands deliver a better customer experience in Indian languages using Conversational AI…… Our partnership with Airtel helps us solve these challenges. With this strategic investment, we will work even more closely with them to continuously improve our AI models and build out an enterprise grade, battle hardened product that will make customer interactions more efficient.”
According to information available on Linkedin, Voicezen was founded in 2018 and has 10-14 employees. Apart from Gurgaon, the company also operates office in Hyderabad.
Over the year Conversational AI has emerged as a hot property and is today one of the sought after destinations for investors. The hype around Conversational AI is not without a reason as global Conversational AI Market Size is expected to touch $15.7 billion by 2024.
Although the ongoing COVID-19 crises may hamper India’s nascent AI industry, the buzz around AI including conversational AI is unlikely to abate anytime sooner.
In fact, AI is widely predicted to dominate human society in the coming decades. To make sure that they don’t lose in the AI race, all top tech companies in the world have invested significant capital in AI technology.
