Dialpad buys TalkIQ and adds AI to UberConference and other services

Dialpad, a business communications services firm whose products include business conference provider UberConference, announced today it has acquired TalkIQ, which provides real-time speech recognition. The resulting combination, Dialpad said, will allow it to deliver VoiceAI that provides actionable intelligence from conversations as they happen. Although Dialpad previously offered voice-to-text transcripts of voice mail, this is the first time it is employing artificial intelligence on its platform. The new services enabled by this acquisition include real-time sentiment analysis, real-time coaching where the platform contextually recognizes topics in the conversation and pulls recommended responses from a knowledge base, real-time transcription and Smart Notes, which intelligently summarize the call and generate a list of action items. Dialpad founder and CEO Craig Walker said these enhanced services are now available across his company’s three main product lines — Dialpad phone service for businesses, Uberconference and Dialpad call center. Walker co-founded and had been CEO of GrandCentral Communications, which was acquired in 2009 by Google and became Google Voice. While the word error rate for VoiceAI is only about 10 percent, he said, there isn’t yet an accuracy rate for Smart Notes, which look like this:

From TalkIQ’s point of view, former CEO and current VoiceAI General Manager Dan O’Connell told me, the acquisition provides a calling infrastructure that TalkIQ would otherwise have had to develop for its speech recognition and other services. Among competitors in this space — such as RingCentral, Cisco and Avaya — Walker said none currently have a comparable real-time voice intelligence across business call centers, office phone service and conferencing. But, he added, he expects competition for these capabilities.