Gong’s Topic Detection Technology Is Issued A Patent

When we started Gong, we wanted to give customer-facing teams visibility into their customer conversations — calls, emails, text messages, and any other method in which sellers are communicating with their buyers.

To do this, we realized we needed technology that can understand interactions with customers.

The main method available at the time was based on keywords. Many first-generation technology players were trying to provide so-called speech analytics solutions to the call center space, mostly based on keywords.

But, to truly understand conversations, we quickly realized this approach is fundamentally lacking.

For example, to understand whether someone talks about pricing, one may be tempted to try out all the words associated with pricing, like “cost”, “dollars”, or “discount”. This method works up to a certain level. Sure, it detects when people talk about the topic, pricing in this example. The problem is that in most cases, it also picks up false positives, a problem called precision in the machine language vernacular.

For example, the word “dollar” may come up in a smalltalk discussion about family, a car rental conversation about Dollar (the company), or a financial discussion around a return-of-investment (ROI) of a software solution. The reality is that to successfully understand human language, one needs to consider context, not just a word or a set of words, but also where they appear.

It’s now patented

Today, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued patent #10,642,889 titled “Unsupervised automated topic detection, segmentation and labeling of conversations”, which protects our technology for understanding topics in customer conversations.

If you’re curious to understand the essence of the technology and how it came about, check out our Gong blog post.