INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Oto, a startup spun off from research at SRI International to help customer service operations understand voice intonation, announced a $5.3
million seed round today.Participants in the round included Firstminute Capital, Fusion Fund, Interlace Ventures, SAP.iO and SRI
The total includes a previous $1 million seed round, according to the company.Teo Borschberg, co-founder and CEO at Oto, says the company
The goal is to use this area of artificial intelligence to improve interactions between customer service reps (CSRs) and customers in real
time.As part of the research phase, the company compiled a database of 100,000 utterances from 3,000 speakers, culled from two million sales
From this data, it has built a couple of tools to help customer service operations automate intonation understanding.The first is a live
With Oto, CSRs can get real-time coaching on every call to raise their energy or to calm a frustrated customer before a problem escalates
satisfaction scores and cost reduction.The other product measures the quality of a customer experience and gives a score at the end of each
call to help the CSR (and their managers) understand how well they did, simply based on intonation
It displays the score in a dashboard
He believes that surveying people is just a part of the story
You can build a better customer experience when you understand intonation of just how well that experience is going, and you put it on a
scale so that it makes it easy to understand just how well or how poorly you are doing.The company has 20 employees today, with offices in
New York, Zurich and Lisbon
It has seven customers working with the product so far, but it is still early days.
