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PolyAI

Available through IT Raven

  • Contact Center and CX

PolyAI builds voice assistants that answer a company's phone calls and hold a normal conversation, with no menus and no keywords to remember. It was founded in 2017 and says it grew out of a Cambridge research lab known for early work in speech recognition.

Its focus is the phone call. A caller says what they want in their own words, with their own accent, on a bad line, and the assistant works out what they mean, completes the task or hands them to a person. PolyAI describes three stages it builds itself: speech recognition a client can tune, a language model made for customer service, and a synthetic voice designed for the brand.

Best for

  • Contact centers that cannot hire or keep enough agents for their call volume.
  • Businesses with seasonal or sudden peaks that do not want to staff for the worst day of the year.
  • Companies that want to add voice AI without replacing their phone menus or contact center platform first.
  • Home service, utility and delivery companies with many calls about scheduling, billing and order status.
  • Hotels and casinos short of front desk and reservations staff.
  • Multinational companies that need one assistant working in many languages.
  • Services where the assistant must recognize an emergency and pass the caller to a person at once.

What they offer

CX and Conversational AI. A voice assistant for inbound calls that PolyAI says can resolve up to 90 percent of customer service inquiries and take thousands of calls at the same moment. It handles identity checks, order tracking, bookings, billing questions and common questions, and passes the caller to an agent when needed. Changes to what it knows and how calls flow can be made by your own team or by PolyAI's. Its newer overview counts 18 languages in service.

Proof

PolyAI says it has published more than 200 research papers, holds more than a dozen patents and was named to the Forbes AI 50 list in 2023.

Its customer stories withhold the names.

A multinational delivery company. Calls about tracking and rescheduling averaged 34 minutes to handle, and some callers waited more than an hour. The assistant handled 30 percent of calls on its first day and 50 percent within two months, in eleven languages.

A large United States utility. It launched a voice assistant beside its existing phone menu with no connections to its back-end systems. The target was to contain 3.5 percent of calls. It contained 15 percent on the first day and has since averaged 18 percent.

These figures are PolyAI's own.

Good to know

  • The 90 percent figure is a ceiling PolyAI states for the technology. Its own case studies report 15 to 50 percent of calls handled, which is the range to plan around.
  • PolyAI argues that automating a phone call saves about four times as much agent time as automating the same request in chat. That is its own estimate.
  • A first phase can go live with no integrations, as the utility did, and deeper connections to your systems can follow.
  • PolyAI advises deploying a voice assistant before switching contact center platforms, to clarify requirements first.
  • Two of its overviews list different offices and language counts, so they are from different years. Neither is dated.

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