PolyAI

PolyAI is a company building an enterprise conversational platform with AI-generated voice assistants to improve customer experience (CX). PolyAI's platform allows customers to speak naturally, interrupt the assistant, and change topics. Poly AI aims to increase enterprise call center capacity, resolving more complex inquiries while reducing wait times and misrouting. Customers can design, integrate, and deploy customized voice assistants based on their brand. The new voice assistant integrates into existing tech stacks, and the platform provides a real-time dashboard to monitor and analyze performance and find improvements.

PolyAI's conversational platform is used by companies in a number of industries, including consumer services, healthcare, financial services, hotels, insurance, restaurants, retail, telecom, and travel. These companies use the platform to integrate a range of different customer service use cases, including account management, authentication, call routing, billing & payments, booking & reservations, FAQs, order management, and troubleshooting.

PolyAI was founded by Nikola Mrkšić (CEO), Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen, and Pei-Hao (Eddy) Su in 2017 to apply the latest conversational AI research to customer service. The three founders met in the dialog systems group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge. They previously worked at Apple (Mrkšić), Google (Wen), and Facebook (Su). The company is headquartered in London with an office in New York.

On March 8, 2019, PolyAI announced $12 million in Series A funding led by Point72 Ventures with investments from Sands Capital Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital, and Entrepreneur First. This follows a previous $2.4 million seed round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Passion Capital. In September 2021, the company announced a $14 million funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). In September 2022, PolyAI raised $40 million

in Series B funding led by Georgian with participation from Twilio Ventures as well as existing investors (Khosla Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners). The round brings the total raised by the company to $70 million and values the company at nearly $300 million post-money.

PolyAI's conversational platform is used by companies in a number of industries, including consumer services, healthcare, financial services, hotels, insurance, restaurants, retail, telecom, and travel. These companies use the platform to integrate a range of different customer service use cases, including account management, authentication, call routing, billing & payments, booking & reservations, FAQs, order management, and troubleshooting.

PolyAI's voice platform technology uses speech synthesis with a combination of retrieval and generative AI trained specifically for customer service use cases. The company's propriety natural language understanding (NLU) model, ConveRT, can extract intent and entities through the person's natural voice. The model has been benchmarked by the Salesforce Research team. A spoken language understanding (SLU) tech stack lets voice assistants fix faulty speech recognition outputs in real-timereal time. The platform utilizes different speech recognition models at different points of the conversation to improve performance in different contexts. PolyAI's speech generation is a combination of real and synthesized voices based on the profile orof real people. It enables businesses to develop and update their voice assistant based on performance.

PolyAI is offered in 45forty-five languages as standards, with plans to add more. Available lanaguageslanguages include English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish. While the company focuses on voice-first customer service, its technology also offers chat experiences. PolyAI researchers have published over 200 papers that have been cited over 12,000 times. The company's technology is protected by six patents, with three more pending as of December 2023.

PolyAI fits into the call center tech stack by routing calls to the voice assistant through a SIP or PTSN integration into the contact center as a service (CCaaS) or telephony provider. Other systems can also be integrated via APIs. PoluAI offers both out-of-the-box and custom integrations for a number of related platforms and tools including:

PolyAI was founded by Nikola Mrkšić (CEO), Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen, and Pei-Hao (Eddy) Su in 2017 to apply the latest conversational AI research to customer service. The three founders met in the dialog systems group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge. They previously worked at at Apple (Mrkšić), Google (Wen), and Facebook (Su). The company is headquartered in London with an office in New York.