The French tech firm, Rounded, is propelling the future of customer interaction with their belief that Artificial Intelligence (AI) voice agents will soon become the standard. Rather than creating ready-made AI voice agents, the company is developing a platform that allows businesses to create their own custom voice agents.
Initially, Rounded was engrossed in developing a web3 product. However, in June 2023, they pivoted to AI voice agents. Rounded’s co-founder, Aymeric Vaudelin, shared with TechCrunch that the initial idea was to combine a transcriber and a synthesizer with ChatGPT, hoping to bring value to the market.
However, the company soon faced a common challenge – finding the right product-market fit. After several months, they realized that the market was not prepared for voice agents. Thus, they developed a product, packaging everything needed to create a primary agent, as explained by Vaudelin.
This led to the creation of Donna, an AI voice agent designed specifically for anesthetists. This choice was not random, as anesthesia secretaries often deal with a large number of patients and require efficient transactional exchange. In France, patients must consult with anesthetists before surgery to check for allergies or potential complications, resulting in a high volume of calls for the secretaries.
Donna was designed to handle these calls, which typically involve scheduling or rescheduling appointments. Since these calls don’t involve sales, the AI agent doesn’t need to be persuasive or highly efficient. Despite some initial struggles with latency issues, Donna was successful, and Rounded convinced 15 private hospitals to utilize the AI voice agent.
Over time, Rounded has enhanced Donna, improving its accuracy, integration with other products, and speed. They have now expanded their offerings to include an orchestration product, enabling other companies to build their own voice agents.
Rounded’s platform allows businesses to select their preferred AI models, including speech-to-text models, LLM, and text-to-speech models. The platform also assists in defining instruction trees and prompts specific to the business’s use case. Vaudelin asserts that Rounded’s goal is to enable everyone to create excellent prompts or agents and provide support throughout the iteration process.
Rounded, despite being in a highly competitive industry, has successfully raised approximately $620,000 from UC Berkeley’s deeptech accelerator SkyDeck and several business angels. With the buzz around artificial intelligence continuing to grow, it’s anticipated that Rounded will secure additional funding in the near future.
