Vendor Briefing: Uniphore
Uniphore is a rapidly growing AI-enabled conversational service automation platform, which aims to deliver advanced customer service experiences for enterprise contact center. Founded in India in 2008 and then productized for a global market in 2016, Uniphore offers an integrated suite of SaaS products that can augment contact center capabilities, including the ability to support 100+ languages and dialects.
Uniphore’s two SaaS solutions are:
- AuMina: a conversational automation and analytics solution for better business outcomes and regulatory compliance. Capabilities include:
- Audio capture
- Audio pre-processing
- Audio streaming
- Speaker diarization
- Voice, chat, and email analytics
- Word cloud, smart search, and topic discovery
- Language identification
- Best-of-breed speech engine
- ML/NLP Sentiment analysis
- Smart intent NLP engine
- Rules engine
- Scoring engine
- Notification and alerts
- Generic UI layer
- Profile management
- Reporting and analytics
- Security/voice biometrics
- Akeira: a conversational assistant for self-service customer experience for optimizing contact center resources and costs. Capabilities include:
- Speech recognition
- Conversational AI across web, mobile, and IVR
- In-house NLU
- Human assisted IVA training
- Multi-turn intent
- Pre-built conversation packs
- Machine learning training
Uniphore is primarily marketed as a software enhancement overlay to enterprises’ current contact center solution. Uniphore is thus heavily interoperable, integrating with a wide range of market leaders in the contact center and customer relations management space. This includes vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Twilio, Genesys, Salesforce, and Oracle.
Uniphore currently has offices in India, Singapore, USA, and Indonesia. Still, given Uniphore’s wide-ranging support for global languages and its rapid growth, it plans to expand across European, South America, and APAC markets over the next 12-24 months.
Image used with permission of Uniphore. Accessed August 18, 2020.
Our Take
For Info-Tech members that are seeking to enhance their contact center solutions with speech analytics, Uniphore is certainly a best-of-breed to shortlist. This is especially the case for Info-Tech members with multi-lingual contact center requirements. It is not an overstatement to say that Uniphore offers the largest range of language and dialect recognition than any other major players in this space, including Amazon Lex and Google Dialogflow.
Indeed, the other benefit of shortlisting Uniphore is that the vendor does not come with the baggage of being tied to one ecosystem or the other; Amazon Lex and Google Dialogflow are connected to AWS and Google Cloud respectively. Uniphore instead has focused on its interoperability, serving as an easy-to-implement overlay for major contact center vendors.
Uniphore is less well-known outside of South East Asia, but there are several facts that show how much promise Uniphore has. For instance, Uniphore has attained a range of awards in the past two years, including “Best Artificial Intelligence Solution” at Global CX Sumit (2019) and best product company in Analytics Solutions by Express IT Awards (2018). Uniphore’s CEO Umesh Sachdev also deserves mention; Sachdev was awarded the ET Now Business Leader of the Year (2020), was honored as a “Top 40 Under 40 Leader” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and was chosen as the 10 “Next Generation Leaders” by Time magazine (2016). Uniphore is also attracting big names as investors and advisors: John Chambers, Chairman Emeritus of Cisco, has joined Uniphore as a “Chief Guru.”
As such, for Info-Tech members looking to advance their contact center without necessarily having to switch major vendors or wait to see what is in their vendor’s product timeline, Uniphore might well be worth shortlisting.
Image used with permission of Uniphore. Accessed August 18, 2020.