Omilia raises $20M to boost adoption of advanced conversational AI and voice biometrics

Conversational AI and voice biometrics startup Omilia has raised an impressive $20 million in a Series A funding round to boost its direct and indirect go-to-market organizations for the technology it describes as “human-like” in North America and Western Europe, and extend its technology footprint.

The funding comes from Grafton Capital, with the software-focussed growth equity firm becoming Omilia’s first institutional investor. Grafton Managing Partner Oliver Thomas will join Omilia’s board of directors.

The company’s deepVB voice biometric technology operates in the background to verify the caller’s identity, and its customer care virtual assistant leverages machine learning (ML) algorithms for a more lifelike experience, which separates it from other Natural Language Understanding software, according to the announcement. The technology also works on all platforms, including social networks and smart speakers, and with any existing system.

“The advantage of deepVB over competitive offerings is that we can do a very accurate reading with very little speech sample, and in the background,” Omilia Co-founder and CEO Dimitris Vassos told TechCrunch. “Users don’t need to say anything special. Therefore, we can seamlessly blend this technology in our AI voice bots.”

Omilia’s contextually aware dialogue management system guides the caller with efficient, human-level intelligence, and without lengthy wait times, complex security protocols or hold music.

Customers implementing Omilia can improve their users’ satisfaction and increase automation in a unified platform to take pressure off contact center staff.

The software supports 21 languages, including regional dialects and accents, and is trusted by large banks, mobile operators, and insurance firms. Omilia says it has improved the call capacity of its enterprise customers by 43 percent, increased self-service usage by 40 percent, reduced internal transfers by 96 percent, and cut call handling time by 50 percent and costs by 20 percent.

The company reports that its revenues increased by more than 100 percent in 2019, coming mostly from North America.

Article Topics

AI  |  artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  funding  |  investment  |  Omilia  |  voice biometrics  |  voice recognition