Conversational AI provider Uniphore acquires Hexagone for behavioral analytics

Conversational synthetic intelligence supplier Uniphore Technologies Inc. right this moment announced it has acquired France-based Hexagone.

For these not aware of Hexagone, the corporate brings collectively voice, video and text-based information to supply AI-based insights to assist corporations perceive human conduct and sentiment. This provides to the emotion detection capabilities Uniphore gained with the 2021 acquisition of Emotion Research Labs. As a part of the acquisition, Hexagone founder and Chief Government Camille Srour and his crew of knowledge scientists have joined Uniphore.

With the addition of Hexagone, Uniphore can considerably enhance its capability to grasp buyer sentiment and conduct, throughout all channels, in its X Platform. The world has grow to be more and more digitized with manufacturers counting on bots, digital brokers, messaging and strategies of coping with prospects. Though these add a degree of effectivity, they dehumanize buyer conversations.

Behavioral analytics can be utilized to deliver empathy and accuracy into interactions and direct subsequent motion. For instance, if a person calls a retailer and begins interacting with a model’s digital agent and is upset, the system may instantly switch the decision to a human as a substitute of irritating the individual extra.

There are various conversational AI distributors right this moment, however Uniphore is exclusive in that it has taken a platform strategy the place it’s attempting to ship on all features of the expertise. That will let a Uniphore buyer work together with their prospects through any channel however then mix it with behavioral analytics, permitting for the optimum mixture of human and digital interactions.

That has been the aim of Uniphore because it was based. Simply after launching, I mentioned the imaginative and prescient for the corporate with former Cisco Techniques Inc. Chief Government John Chambers (pictured, left), whose VC agency JC2 Ventures was an early investor within the firm. On this 2021 ZKast with Chambers, he created parallels with what Uniphore is doing with conversational AI to Cisco’s technique within the late Nineteen Nineties.

Below his watch, Cisco gained de facto commonplace standing and have become the overwhelming market chief in networking by bringing collectively all types of communications — voice, video and information — on a single community. Equally, Uniphore is bringing collectively all conversational channels – voice, video and information — right into a single platform.

It’s this idea of understanding all features of conversations that’s being the focus for Uniphore. “Conversations are the lifeblood of each enterprise and with the ability to derive worth from them is vital as corporations compete to succeed,” stated Umesh Sachdev (proper), co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. “This acquisition brings distinctive capabilities to our X platform, making it the one platform that may fuse vital indicators from completely different behavioral modalities in a dialog collectively. This in the end gives organizations with the correct data to make each dialog depend.”

Final week, Uniphore introduced the acquisition of U.K.-based Red Box, which solves the info sovereignty drawback for regulated industries corresponding to monetary providers and healthcare. The corporate additionally allows Uniphore to enhance its compliance capabilities, which is an space in dire want of innovation. Most corporations have good processes in place for monitoring text-based conversations or telephone calls when the person is within the workplace. With hybrid work, these controls are now not there. Compliance must be automated and pushed by AI, so all interactions are being watched.

That is Uniphore’s second acquisition in two weeks and the fifth since its launch. Given all of the layoffs within the cloud communications business, it might appear stunning that Uniphore is shopping for corporations and including headcount, however that’s one other web page from the John Chambers playbook. By way of the years, he has advised me repeatedly that when markets are down, that’s the very best time to speculate and set the corporate as much as break free from the competitors when the market turns up. In the course of the early 2000s, when the dot-com bubble had burst, Cisco went on a procuring spree and that created the inspiration for the corporate’s subsequent wave of progress.

The strategy that Uniphore is taking is in step with my very own definition of conversational AI. I’ve been extremely vital of the Gartner Magic Quadrant on this subject as a result of it equates conversational AI to speak bots, however it’s a lot greater than that. The truth is, with out AI, chat bots are subsequent to ineffective and trigger extra buyer frustration than they clear up. Companies must be investing in that space, however they have to be cautious to make sure that empathy will be delivered whatever the communications medium.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Analysis, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.

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