Best Voice Assistance Applications Startups
Voice assistant applications are digital assistants that use technologies such as voice recognition, speech synthesis, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Voice assistant applications offer services through a particular virtual assistant application. Many devices, as well as mobile and web applications, utilize voice assistant applications every day. Voice assistant is one of the key application areas across verticals, such as automotive, retail, healthcare, education, and telecommunication.360Quadrants recognizes the below as best voice assistance application startups-
Top 10 Voice Assistance Application Startups 2020:
- AVAAMO Conversational AI Platform
- Senseforth A.ware Platform
- VoiceA Platform
- Kore AI
- RASA Framework
- Just AI Aimylogic
- Voysis Conversational AI Platform
- Haptik Conversational AI Platform
- ServiceFriend Bubblez
- SNIPS Voice Platform
Voice Assistance Applications Startups Market Overview
Voice assistant applications are nowadays increasingly well accepted as well as available on various platforms, such as Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant. Most of the Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) are continuing to offer and lead the market by offering voice services. Voice assistant application combines voice-based technology, NLP, and machine learning into a single platform to develop and build solutions for any specific as well as multiple use cases across different verticals. The application areas of voice assistant applications startup are majorly covered under verticals such as automotive; Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI); retail; and media and entertainment. For instance, by collaborating with Nuance Communications, Mercedes-Benz has deployed a multimedia system, MBUX, an AI-based voice assistant, to enhance its customer experience.
20 voice assistant application startups were analyzed, shortlisted and categorized on a quadrant under Progressive Companies, Responsive Companies, Dynamic Companies, and Starting Blocks to identified best voice assistant application startups.
The competitive leadership mapping (Quadrant) showcased below provides information for 20 top voice assistant application startups. Vendor evaluations are based on two broad categories: product offering and business strategy. Each category carries various criteria, based on which vendors have been evaluated. The evaluation criteria considered under product offerings include the breadth of offering, delivery (based on industries that the vendors cater to, deployment models, and subscriptions), features/functionality, delivery, product quality and reliability, and product differentiation. The evaluation criteria considered under business strategy include geographic footprint (on the basis of geographic presence), channel strategy and fit, vision alignment, and effectiveness of growth (on the basis of innovations, partnerships, collaborations, and acquisitions).
Vendors who fall into this category receive high scores for most of the evaluation criteria. They have a strong and established product portfolio and a very strong market presence. They provide mature and reputable data integration tools. They also have strong business strategies. The best voice assistant application startups leaders include Avaamo, Senseforth and Kore AI.
The dynamic companies category includes established vendors with very strong business strategies. However, they need to focus on their product portfolio. Clinc and Unvired are considered as the best voice assistant application startups in this market.
Responsive Companies in the MicroQuadrant are the vendors who have demonstrated substantial product innovations as compared to their competitors. They have very focused product portfolios. However, they need to invest in their growth strategies for their overall businesses. Voysis and SNIPS Voice are recognized as some of the top voice assistant application startups.
Datch Assistant and Mycroft Mark II are recognized as the starting blocks in the voice assistant application startup market. The emerging players specialize in offering highly niche solutions and services. They do not have strong business strategies as compared to established vendors.
Which industries can voice assistance applications startups cater to?
Banks and Financial Institutes - Voice assistant applications help the financial institutions in flawlessly connecting with customers and shaping the business system with improved customer experience and lowered customer churn. In the current scenario, the BFSI end-use vertical represents the highest adoption of voice assistant applications compared to all the other end-user verticals as many banking firms are encouraging online transactions with the help of bots and artificial intelligence-powered guided instructions and services.
Healthcare - Technological advancements have played a vital role in the healthcare sector. The sector is looking for the right tool and technology to engage with patients in a better way. Voice assistant applications are widely adopted across the healthcare industry to improve patient management, monitoring, and engagement. Additionally, voice assistant can enhance the patient experience and build patient loyalty, while improving organizational efficiency. Using voice assistant, healthcare stakeholders can easily perform the routine healthcare-related tasks, such as scheduling appointments, filling out or updating forms, and making bill payments.
Retail - Retail and eCommerce businesses are focusing fully on customer engagement channel to fulfil the demand of tech-savvy consumers. Due to an increase in mobile subscribers, mCommerce plays a vital role in the retail and eCommerce industry. It helps in improving the customer experience, employee efficiency, and the overall functioning of the business. Enterprises across the retail and eCommerce sector have increasingly deployed voice assistant on various channels for greater customer engagement. Voice assistant application startups can help businesses digitally engage with their customers.
Media and Entertainment - Media and entertainment is a growing field for voice assistant application startups. Companies are optimizing the customer experience by deploying voice assistant application solutions on various platforms, such as websites, messaging apps, and social media platforms. Media and entertainment is a highly evolving sector, where the competition among companies is comparatively fierce. Maximizing customer satisfaction and improving the brand recall value and loyalty are the key factors for success in this industry. This is helping these companies in delivering a seamless, personal, and profitable experience to their customers.
Telecom and IT Industry - The telecom and IT industry has been constantly changing in terms of technology advancements and competition. The unpredictable nature of the telecom marketplace and the high subscriber churn rate have compelled many telecom providers to become more responsive and integrate robust customer experience management tools in their business systems. Voice Assistance Applications help user access the required data at a faster rate as queries are resolved more accurately by bots. It also provides convenience though chatbots.
Application and Benefits of Top Voice Assistant Application
- Web Applications - There is an increase in the adoption of web applications by workforces to drive the growth of voice assistant applications. Voice Assistant Application Startups can benefit widely from using web applications to reach out to customers. Websites or web applications are an intuitive option for end users to connect with businesses. In today’s era, a website is the first point of contact for customers or end users to interact with businesses. The website encompasses information about products, solutions, services, partner ecosystems, and innovative search options for customers.
- Mobile Application - Mobile voice assistant applications improve user experience as well as reduce time to find the right content. Enterprise mobility, BYOD, and COPE trends are driving the adoption of voice assistant applications on mobile devices. Mobile applications enable users to interact with businesses in a more personalized manner. The penetration of smartphones and tablets across the enterprises’ workforce has been increasing at a rapid pace. Therefore, enterprises are willingly deploying voice assistant applications on mobile applications.
- Multiple Channels - Voice assistant application devices offer multiple interaction channels, consistent services, and help reduce cost. Businesses are deploying voice assistant on various devices, including smart devices, IoT devices, and cars. Voice assistants are built on advanced natural language and speech recognition technologies to provide real-time virtual assistance to the customers. The adoption of smart devices has been burgeoning across the enterprise environment.
- Security - Data sensitive enterprises or verticals, such as BFSI and healthcare, prefer on-premises deployment of voice assistant application solutions. The on-premises deployment mode is nothing but the installation of voice assistant application solutions and associated services on the premise of a person or organization. This deployment is one of the secured types of deployment mode and mostly adopted by large enterprises, as they have well-established physical servers, expert IT technicians, and sufficient budgets. Security is the key factor for the on-premises deployment and vendors in the market are helping deploy voice assistant application solutions into the client’s premise securely with the easy to manage, upgrade, and scale functionality.
What are the regulatory implications for Voice Assistant Application Startup?
GDPR - GDPR is one of the major catalysts for a wholesale review of data protection and processing requirements. This new regulation would drive innovation in the way that electronic devices themselves collate and process information. Moreover, this trend is applicable for a wide range of applications, such as video surveillance, remote monitoring, location services, access management, and predictive maintenance.
HIPAA - The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance ensures the protection of the privacy of personal health information and gives patients the right to their own Protected Health Information (PHI). HIPAA defines the types of Electronic Health Records (EHR) used to identify patients uniquely. These records include names, birth dates, admission dates, telephone/fax numbers, social security numbers, medical record numbers, health plan beneficiary numbers, and biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints.
FTC - The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) policy and enforcement priorities—and the development of cutting-edge software tools, such as AI—have a significant impact on the digital economy. The agency has a long track record of evaluating its policy and enforcement approaches, including its 1995 hearings on competition and consumer protection; its pre-centennial global workshops to ascertain how to remain effective in its second century; and its Privacy Roundtables, launched almost 10 years ago, that examined how best to protect privacy in an evolving marketplace.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 - It is a joint technical committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain, and promote standards in the fields of IT and ICT. Joint Technology Committee (JTC) 1 has been responsible for many critical IT standards, ranging from the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) video format fame to the C++ programming language.
What drives the Voice Assistant Application Market?
- Enhanced customer experience
- Businesses leveraging social media platforms as a prime marketing channel
- Advancement in NLP and ASR ecosystem
- Omni-channel deployment
Use Cases
Challenge: To orchestrate meeting scheduling using voice assistant application
Solution: Alexa for Business
Results:
- Built voice-enabled conference room
- Increased workforce productivity by focusing on meetings rather than setting up the conference room
Trends and Facts
- The demand for voice assistant application solutions is increasing globally, due to the increasing demand for offering enhanced customer support across major industry verticals.
- Businesses are extensively integrating voice assistant application with their enterprise application. Moreover, vendors are supporting enterprise customer to deliver integrated voice assistant solution.
- The mobile application segment is expected to gain traction across the globe during the forecast period, as mobile users are increasing at a rapid pace across the globe. Businesses find it easy to engage with customers on the mobile platform.
- Call center opted by every industry vertical is expected to embrace voice-based virtual assistant solutions.
- Technological advancements, such as AI, machine learning, ASR, and NLP, have a major impact on the growth of the voice assistant application startup market.
Best Voice Assistant Application Startups in 2022
A.ware is an innovative AI Platform with deep domain knowledge to build Intelligent chatbots for enterprises. The platform is built on six different engines that use innovative core concepts- Advanced NLP, Context, Actionization, Learning, Conversations, Analytics & Insights. The platform is flexible and versatile enough that works across a range of locations - cloud, on-premise or even a hybrid of the two. It is embedded with various pre-built connectors to different channels. Moreover, the platform allows to build generative model smart bots with deep learning capabilities that minimize the need for human management over time.
Voicea is a voice association platform supported by an Enterprise Voice Assistant named EVA. EVA is an AI that accepts commands, completes actions and captures highlights in meetings to share them and create actionable recaps. Using EVA on conference lines, on calls, or in-person, Voicea helps to focus on the conversation knowing EVA will capture and share whatever is highlighted. The platform ensures to turn talk into an action. Moreover, it accepts Voice Commands to create reminders, tasks, answer questions and provide meeting recaps.
Kore.ai’s AI and NLP teams have both depth and breadth of Industry experience in designing and implementing multiple complex Chabot projects across Enterprises. This ensures a successful implementation, irrespective of how complex the use cases are. They assist and guide their enterprise clients on how to incorporate chatbots as part of an overall digital strategy. As part of the development and implementation services, they help users design architecture for conversational applications. Their managed services include ongoing maintenance and enhancements, QA, analytics and dashboard-based reporting for management of the chatbot infrastructure.
Rasa is an open source machine learning framework for building contextual AI assistants and chatbots. Rasa has two main modules- NLU for understanding user messages and Core for holding conversations and deciding what to do next. Rasa X is a tool that helps to build, improve, and deploy AI Assistants that are powered by the Rasa framework. Rasa X includes a user interface and a REST API.
Bubblez is capable to handle the sporadic text messaging and the massive volumes involved for large enterprises to handle messaging with “standard” help desk / CRM desktop applications. It also deals with high volume of casual texts and asynchronous discussions that can last days. Moreover, Bubblez is quite capable to tell when the next message from the customer will arrive and what is the context.
Snips Voice Platform is a software solution to perform spoken language understanding on microprocessors typical of IoT devices. The embedded inference is fast and accurate while enforcing privacy by design, as no personal user data is ever collected. It focuses on automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. It allows to train high-performance machine learning models that are small enough to run in real-time on small devices. Businesses or individuals, anyone can set up the Snips Platform on a single board computer (for example: a Raspberry Pi 3, an i.MX8M board, an Android or an iOS device), and install a voice assistant on it.
Orbita Voice platform controls solutions that increase operational efficiencies and improve consumer, patient and member experiences to enhance remote patient monitoring, population health, customer service, member wellness, clinical trials and more. The company's award-winning, HIPAA-compliant platform for voice and chatbot applications in healthcare unveiled a trio of enhancements that significantly expand the capabilities of Orbita Voice.
The Platform can be used to build AI enabled chatbots that enable a conversational interface with systems—both Text and Voice. It can be integrated with Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine enhanced by additional customizations, open source Machine Learning/AI technology, and a Visual Conversation (Dialog) Builder. Moreover, Chyme has built-in algorithms to recognize and score knowledgebase search results and improve user experience. Chyme Platform includes multiple intelligent bots like IT Help Desk Assistant, Sales Assistant, Customer Services Assistant, SAP Assistant, etc. Chyme enables a Conversational Interface (Chatbots) with systems like SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, and others to Simplify Work.
Mycroft Mark II is designed with an array of six individual microphones capable of detecting where the user is speaking from. A 10-watt speaker with dual two-inch full-range drivers capable to fill the space with your music, or at least make its voice heard across the room. Mark II is in-built with a 4-inch LCD panel that can be used to display information, graphics, or a friendly face. As it’s an open source it is modifiable, open to scrutiny and audit, and unencumbered by patents and other ugly legal hindrances to a vibrant community-developed platform.
It’s a ground-breaking SaaS Platform for making, monitoring and deploying voice and chat applications. Smartly.AI bots can talk more than 140 languages. The platform helps companies to make their products, content and services available via voicebots, chatbots and callbots using multiple channels such as webchats, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
DigitalGenius AutoPilot is the ground-breaking solution to enable end-to-end case resolution of common repetitive journeys without human intervention. This frees agents to focus on higher-level conversations, while lowering the costs of your customer support operations. The platform is powered by deep learning that understands customers’ objectives, drives automated resolutions through APIs that connect seamlessly to backend systems. It increases agent capacity by up to 70%. The AI learns from every agent interaction, so it gets smarter over time, allowing for faster, more responsive customer service that combines the best of human intelligence and machine learning.
AVA is a full stack automotive voice assistance platform. The platform is entirely customizable, tested and is ready for production. AVA is a hybrid platform that is capable of operating offline. It offers key infotainment services like calls, messaging, music etc. Telematics services have been integrated into the platform which can also be customized according to the user’s requirements. It also includes full scale navigation.
