Introducing Airbud (now Hyro)
It’s no surprise that talking with technology is becoming part of our new day-to-day. Over the last few years, speaking to our devices has become less Star Trek, and more mainstream — a practice accessible for consumers of all ages — due both to its frictionless nature, and a spike in scalability by heavy-hitters like Amazon and Google who’ve brought their voice assistants to the masses. People around the world are becoming increasingly comfortable with, and even reliant on, performing tasks through dialogue. From setting timers to ordering detergent, consumers’ daily behaviors and expectations are evolving.
And enterprises are paying close attention, already capitalizing on these emerging conversational technologies.
Take Bank of America’s conversational AI assistant, Erica. In just over a year, its logged over 7 million users and 50 million client requests. Conversational agents like Erica have been increasingly buzzed about over the past decade for their potential to optimize and reimagine customer engagement — but tremendous success has been dependent on an equally tremendous investment. If you can’t spend the big bucks, chatbots tend to be simplistic and limited to a predefined tree of flows and intents. Without a robust IT department or designated AI experts, that exemplary Erica-type solution will fall flat. And the barriers are even greater when dealing with more complex industries, like government or healthcare, where sites are rife with dense language and regulation.
Because today’s consumer is already accustomed to a seamless digital experience and instant satisfaction, we are witnessing a growing friction between users in their interactions with companies that haven’t kept up pace. So today, on the heels of announcing our $4 million seed round, we couldn’t be more excited to introduce Airbud to you.
Alongside my co-founders Uri Valevski and Rom Cohen, we launched Airbud with a shared vision of navigating the entire web through simple conversation, and we are committed to helping all organizations get there. We’re bridging the gap, and focusing especially on those dense, information-heavy sites where a consumer’s experience isn’t meeting their expectations.
Based out of offices in New York, San Francisco and Tel Aviv, we’re launching our conversational AI SaaS platform for enterprises, and eliminating the heavy lifting typically required to create chat and voice assistants from scratch. Our zero-touch solution uses a website’s existing data to generate conversational AI agents that can be deployed within a week — but most importantly, achieves high quality through a pioneering linguistics approach. Through a twist on traditional data scraping and a model built on Natural Language Understanding as opposed to solely using Machine Learning methods, we’re here to arm businesses with the ultimate tool to master what we call conversation-based consumerism.
A recent study by Gartner estimates that nearly a third of all web browsing would be voice activated by 2020. Knowing this, perhaps you’ve considered a conversational experience or chatbot for your organization — ultimately deciding to hold off, because the quality was unimpressive, or the investment just wasn’t worth it. In a crowded space of less costly and DIY solutions, it’s true that so many miss the mark. Until now. That 2020 projection date is just around the corner… and we’re here to ensure that all organizations are ready.
Drop us a line at contact@hyro.ai and follow along on LinkedIn to see how we’re revolutionizing the way enterprises engage with their customers — through a conversation.
