Collaborate Disseminate
When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help […] Continue reading Leena AI nabs $8M Series as it expands from chatbots to HR service platform
Can you tell whether you’re talking to a human or AI? Continue reading ‘Bot or Not?’ – a game to train us to spot chatbots faking it as humans
Directly, a startup whose mission is to help build better customer service chatbots by using experts in specific areas to train them, has raised more funding as it opens up a new front to grow its business: APIs and a partner ecosystem that can now also tap into its expert network. Today Directly is announcing […] Continue reading Directly, which trains customer service chatbots with expert advice, raises $11M more
Last December, when CRM startup Kustomer was announcing its latest round of funding — a $60 million round led by Coatue — its co-founder and CEO Brad Birnbaum said it would use some of the money to build more RPA-style automations into its platform to expand KustomerIQ, its AI-based product that helps understand and respond to […] Continue reading Kustomer acquires Reply.ai to enhance chatbots on its CRM platform
Espressive, a four-year-old startup from former ServiceNow employees, is working to build a better chatbot to reduce calls to company help desks. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B investment. Insight Partners led the round with help from Series A lead investor General Catalyst along with Wing Venture Capital. Under the terms of […] Continue reading Espressive lands $30M Series B to build better help chatbots
I was online chatting at a web site to repair my lawn tractor. Once I finished, I said, “So you’re a chatbot. Cool.” I’m sure I was talking to a chatbot program and not a human. The reply was a brief but emphatic “No!̶… Continue reading Ethics and Chatbots
Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services […] Continue reading Rasa raises $13M led by Accel for its developer-friendly open source approach to chatbots
Anyone who has dealt with bad customer service has felt frustration with the lack of basic understanding of who you are as a customer and what you need. Google and Salesforce feel your pain, and today the two companies expanded their partnership to try and create a smarter customer service experience. The goal is to […] Continue reading Salesforce and Google want to build a smarter customer service experience
One of the great things about enterprise chat applications beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat. […] Continue reading ServiceNow teams with Workplace by Facebook on service chatbot
As the biggest sales and marketing technology firms mature, they are all turning to AI and machine learning to advance the field. This morning it was Oracle’s turn, announcing several AI-fueled features for its suite of sales tools. Rob Tarkoff, who had previous stints at EMC, Adobe and Lithium, and is now EVP of Oracle […] Continue reading Oracle adds more AI features to its suite of sales tools