SoundHound Connects Users to Companies With Customized Conversational Experiences: The 2024 CRM Conversation Starters

Since its founding in 2005, SoundHound has largely been viewed as a speech recognition company. Over the past 20 years, though, the Santa Clara, Calif., company has expanded into natural language understanding, sound and music recognition, search, virtual assistant, and voice artificial intelligence technologies, among others.

SoundHound has recently taken a significant place in the CRM industry, building toward a vision of a voice commerce ecosystem that enables consumers to access goods and services through natural conversation. This includes plans to facilitate voice-enabled food and drink ordering across millions of cars, TVs, and smart devices.

To that end, SoundHound has aggressively invested in its SoundHound for Restaurants voice ordering solution. In June it acquired key assets from Allset, an online restaurant ordering platform provider, and in December, it acquired SYNQ3 Restaurant Solutions, a provider of voice artificial intelligence and other technology for restaurants.

“Restaurant operators are turning to technology en masse, and voice AI is now playing a key role in helping them drive sales, reduce costs, and alleviate the burden of increasing demand on their employees,” said Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and cofounder of SoundHound AI, in a statement.

Intertwined with this industry push, SoundHound in the past few months also introduced Employee Assist, a conversational AI product that supports restaurant employees by allowing them to learn critical information about food, tasks, and other operations without having to reach for a manual or distract other employees. Accessible via headset or tablet, Employee Assist uses SoundHound’s voice AI with generative AI to learn and understand instruction manuals, ingredient and allergen information, and more. It then relays this knowledge directly to employees as part of a fluid two-way conversation, with the system able to answer questions and follow-up questions.

Also new from the company this year is Chat AI, which enables consumers and businesses to submit queries by speaking while text and/or audio output relays the response. Users can also ask follow-up questions and commands to filter, sort, or add more information to their original requests.

SoundHound also launched the fully automated Smart Answering service, which accepts inbound customer calls and then, using speech recognition, natural language understanding, and generative AI, reads and integrates company website information to give tailored, conversational responses to queries.

And then there is Intelligent Transcription, fueled by SoundHound’s Speech-to-Meaning system to not only generate the text of a conversation in real time but also to simultaneously structure it and tag key topics and entities from which it infers speaker meaning and intent. It can also be combined with predictive analytics to suggest responses and next best actions across a broad range of topics.

SoundHound also launched Chat AI for Automotive, an in-vehicle voice assistant to give drivers and their passengers access to information and businesses, enabled by complex conversational capabilities.

But perhaps its most transformative action came just over a month ago when the company acquired Amelia, an artificial intelligence software company, for $80 million. The deal significantly expands SoundHound’s voice and conversational generative AI and customer service portfolio, with reach across multiple industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, automotive, smart devices, restaurants, and more. The move also brings expansive voice commerce opportunities, from ordering food to buying tickets and making appointments from millions of devices.

“Now with more businesses choosing voice AI technology for customer service and more consumers expecting a seamless, AI-powered service, this acquisition positions SoundHound as a strong force with range, scale, and world-class technology,” Mohajer said in a statement.

Lanham Napier, president of Amelia, says the deal bolsters SoundHound’s “growing AI customer service business to form a new category leader in the space.”

“With impressive penetration into a range of vertical industries, proprietary technology, and decades of combined AI experience, SoundHound is well-positioned to take advantage of burgeoning interest in conversational AI customer support,” he adds.