INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Chatbots have had a patchy track record in the world of tech, where early efforts not only failed to deliver on the magical idea of a
computer producing the exact answers you were looking for in a chat-based Q-A, they even produced surprising (and not in a good way) results
HP Enterprise and elsewhere, is stepping up to be the new CEO
Antony Brydon, who co-founded the company with Jeff Patterson (currently head of product), is moving over from the CEO role to become head
customer service.The idea is to hand over the focus on business growth to an expert, while giving a company founder the chance to help
partner at Costanoa Ventures, said in a statement
sign, in my opinion.The valuation is not being disclosed, except Brydon and de la Cruz, in a joint interview this week, confirmed to A
Technology News Room that it is north of $100 million
When this round was being raised, PitchBook data noted that the valuation was $110 million, which roughly lines up with that.They added that
Airbnb (not an investor!)
has emerged at a key time in the world of customer service, and in AI.Although call centres are still a fundamental cornerstone of how
businesses interface with users, the rise of social media and messaging services has created an opportunity to complement and in some cases
replace how those more traditional channels work.While in many cases human agents are still at the other end of those messaging-based,
text-based conversations, sometimes you only might think they are; or when they really are, they are still using a lot of AI tools to help
While there may be some true superstars in the world of customer service who know the product they are representing backwards and forwards,
chances are that the vast majority of people helping customers are not omniscient gurus, and are just human like the people complaining or
It also looks at data input and output into those AI systems to figure out what is working, and what is not, and how to fix that, too.The
information is typically collected by way of question-and-answer sessions, and Directly has even built a way to compensate these experts
providing an assistant to hosts to help answer questions about how to list on the platform.At a time when we are talking a lot about bias in
AI and other pitfalls of how these systems are trained, a company that is working on ways of giving the best shot possible, by limiting the
training data just to what is most likely to be correct and verifiable, is an interesting prospect that lines up with the approaches that
companies like Samasource and others focused on ethical AI are taking.It seems ironic, however, that tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung,
rely on another company to help these along
But the role that Directly occupies somewhat sits outside the core technology, which needs computer vision, natural language processing, a
meantime, it can take as little as 100 experts, but potentially many more, to train a system, depending on how much the information needs to
The Xbox implementation, for example, includes 1,000 experts, but has to date answered around 2 million questions (and will likely answer
multiples of that as games and consoles get updated).The longer-term picture is that Directly is likely to work with a growing number of
biggest players in consumer information, like Google and Amazon
