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Medallia, a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is working on at present and what needs to be addressed, recently acquired Voci Technologies, a speech-to-text startup for a valuation of $59 million
Fremont, CA: Medallia, a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is working on at present and what needs to be addressed, recently acquired Voci Technologies, a speech-to-text startup for a valuation of $59 million in cash.
Medallia plans to integrate the startup’s AI technology so that voice-based interactions — for example from calls into call centers — can be part of the data crunched by its analytics platform. Despite the rise of social media, messaging channels, and at present, the shift for people to do a lot more online, voice calls, accounts for the majority of customer interactions for a business.
"Voci transcribes 100 percent of life and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud," said Leslie Stretch, president, and CEO of Medallia, in a statement. "At the same time, Voci enables call analysis moments after each interaction has completed, optimizing every aspect of call center operations securely. Especially important as virtual and remote contact center operations take shape."
Voci can discern numerous speech-to-text offerings in the market today. it distinguishes among many other combined factors such as including emotion, gender, sentiment, and voice biometric identity. It's also able to filter out personally identifiable information to ensure more privacy around using the data for further analytics.
Voci started life as a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon University, and it had raised a total of about $18 million from investors that included Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Partners, and the university itself. It was last valued at $28 million in March 2018 (during a Series B raise), meaning that today's acquisition was slightly more than double that value.
The company seems to have been on an upswing with its business. Voci has to date processed some 2 billion minutes of speech. In January, the company published some momentum numbers that said bookings had grown some 63% in the last quarter, boosted by contact center customers.
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