Uniphore is a conversational automation technology company. Uniphore sells software for conversational analytics, conversational assistants and conversational security. The company is headquartered in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...

, with offices in the United States, Singapore, India, Japan, Spain, and Israel. Its products help up to 75,000 customer service agents during approximately 160 million interactions per month. Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India identified Uniphore as the 17th fastest-growing technology company in India in 2012 and one of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the

Asia-Pacific Asia-Pacific (APAC) is the part of the world near the western Pacific Ocean. The Asia-Pacific region varies in area depending on context, but it generally includes East Asia, Russian Far East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and Pacific Isla ...

region in 2014. In 2016, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' included Sachdev on its list of "10 millennials who are changing the world" for “building a phone that can understand almost any language”.

NASSCOM The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) is an Indian non-governmental trade association and advocacy group, focused mainly on the technology industry of India. Established in 1988, NASSCOM is a non-profit organis ...

named Uniphore to its "League of 10" emerging Indian technology companies in 2017. In 2020, the ''San Francisco Business Times'' ranked Uniphore as among small companies in its list of the best places to work in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

. In 2022, the company was featured on the ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

'' AI 50 list.

History

Uniphore Software Systems was founded by Umesh Sachdev and Ravi Saraogi in 2008 and was incubated at

IIT Madras Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), it is recognized as an Institute of National Importance and has be ...

. The company received an initial grant of $100,000 from the

National Research Development Corporation The National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) was a non-departmental government body established by the British Government to transfer technology from the public sector to the private sector. History The NRDC was established by Attlee's La ...

. Initially, the company operated a call center providing voice-based internet services to people in rural areas. Uniphore then began working on speech recognition technology, partnering with companies that specialized in English and European languages, and adapting the technology for Indian languages and dialects. In 2014, Uniphore released its flagship product, auMina, along with two other products, Akeira and amVoice. Uniphore raised series A funding, led by

Kris Gopalakrishnan Senapathy "Kris" Gopalakrishnan is an Indian billionaire businessman who is recognized as a global business and technology thought leader for his role in growing the IT services industry worldwide. He co-founded Infosys, where he served as the ...

(cofounder of

Infosys Infosys Limited is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational information technology company that provides business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services. The company was founded in Pune and is headquartered in Ba ...

), in April 2015. The next month, Uniphore received additional investment from

IDG Ventures IDG Ventures is a global family of venture funds with approximately $3.6 billion under management. All of the funds were originally sole-source-funded by International Data Group. The first fund was created by IDG in 1996 and was located in ...

. With input from its investors, Uniphore changed its business model from license fee-based income to a

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

-based subscription fee model in 2015. By June 2016, it had added more than 70 global languages and expanded its services to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. The company opened operations in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

in October 2016. The company raised Series B funding in October 2017, led by John Chambers and existing investors. Series C funding of $51 million was announced in August 2019 and led by March Capital. Uniphore acquired an exclusive third-party license for

robotic process automation Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as ''software robotics'' (not to be ...

technology from

NTT DATA is a Japanese multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a partially-owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT). Japan Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation ...

in October 2020. In January 2021, Uniphore acquired Emotion Research Lab, a startup based in Spain that uses

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and machine learning to analyze video and interpret emotions. The company received $140 million in Series D funding, led by Sorenson Capital Partners, in March 2021, bringing total funding to $210 million. Uniphore acquired

Jacada Jacada is a software and services company that specialized in automating and simplifying customer service operations. The firm, founded by Gideon Hollander, was incorporated December 1990 in Israel as a limited liability company. Jacada operated ...

, a company that specializes in improving and automating contact center processes, in July 2021. , Uniphore's customers included

WNS Global Services WNS (Holdings) Limited () is a global business process management company headquartered in Mumbai, India. The company has its expansion with 60 delivery centers worldwide. History WNS was founded in 1996 by British Airways as Speedwing World ...

Tech Mahindra Tech Mahindra is an Indian multinational information technology services and consulting company. Part of the Mahindra Group, the company is headquartered in Pune and has its registered office in Mumbai. Tech Mahindra is a 6.0 billion company w ...

, NTT DATA, and

Sitel Sitel Group is a privately owned contact center company headquartered in Miami, Florida. It provides outsourced sales, technical support, customer service, and other business processes for large companies. The company has 160,000 employees an ...

, and ,

Firstsource Firstsource Solutions Limited is an Indian business process management company headquartered in Mumbai, India. It is owned by RPSG Group, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group. Firstsource provides business process management in the banking and financial s ...

Products

Uniphore's main platform offers four core services: U-Analyze, U-Self-Serve, for businesses setting up a conversational

AI assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

; U-Trust, for automated voice authentication to verify the identity of an agent working remotely; and U-Assist, which provides transcriptions and alerts in real time during a call. The company says its goal is to supplement, not replace, the efforts of call center staff.

U-Analyze

Uniphore's

speech analytics Speech analytics is the process of analyzing recorded calls to gather customer information to improve communication and future interaction. The process is primarily used by customer contact centers to extract information buried in client interaction ...

software, U-Analyze (formerly auMina), helps organizations identify customer problems by analyzing customer dynamics and call center interactions using

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

. It uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to monitor agents' in-call movements and optimize training programs.

U-Self Serve

U-Self Serve (formerly Akeira) is an

interactive voice response Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact ...

software and

virtual assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

that can help automate customer service for organizations.

U-Trust

U-Trust (formerly amVoice) is a

voice biometrics Speaker recognition is the identification of a person from characteristics of voices. It is used to answer the question "Who is speaking?" The term voice recognition can refer to ''speaker recognition'' or speech recognition. Speaker verification ...

platform that allows the user to authenticate their identity using their voice when working remotely.

U-Assist

U-Assist uses

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

AI models to provide support, including transcriptions and alerts, in real time during calls. It also helps automate dispositions and other work after a call.

Q for Sales

Q for Sales system uses technology including

emotion AI Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While some ...

, speech recognition, and natural language processing to interpret emotional cues. It can provide

real-time data Real-time data (RTD) is information that is delivered immediately after collection. There is no delay in the timeliness of the information provided. Real-time data is often used for navigation or tracking. Such data is usually processed using real- ...

to a salesperson to evaluate a potential customer's engagement and

sentiment Sentiment may refer to: *Feelings, and emotions *Public opinion, also called sentiment *Sentimentality, an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason *Sentimental novel, an 18th-century literary genre *Market sentiment, opt ...

during a video call. Critics including AI ethics scholar

Kate Crawford Kate Crawford (born 1976) is a writer, composer, producer and academic. Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective), the co-founder and former director of research at the AI Now Institute at NYU, a visitin ...

and AI researcher

Timnit Gebru Timnit Gebru ( am, ትምኒት ገብሩ; born 1983/1984) is an American computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black resear ...

have questioned the premise of such systems.

References

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