7 AI Chatbot Startups Giving Technology a Voice

Have you noticed that more and more websites now seem to have someone just waiting there to answer your questions? It’s a familiar chat interface with the first line saying “Hi There, I’m Amy. Let me know if I can answer any questions” and there’s a text box you can type a response into. In the old days, that wasn’t an actual person. As soon as you engaged with the form, then a human took over and chatted with you. Going forward though, any interactions you have in which you type text to speak to a company will be through the use of a chatbot built by one of the many chatbot startups popping up all over the place. 

We wrote before about “The Myth of the Clever AI Chatbot” and how our experience with a conversational chatbot was about as exciting as an MBA alumni networking event. What we failed to note in that article was how important context is. Once you have context, like a visitor to your website that sells shoes, you can then start to train artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms more effectively. That’s why just recently, India’s 3rd largest IT company, WiPro, recently deployed 1,800 chatbots that were able to replace 12,000 workers. After numerous interactions with “John in Mumbai” types, we can assure you those chatbots will actually think outside the box more than the humans they’re replacing (see Exhibit A).

A recent article from IBM titled “How conversation (with context) will usher in the AI future” revealed a consensus among 30 of the most knowledgeable AI scientists and thought leaders, thathuman-computer interactionor HCI will be the primary driver behind the adoption of AI:

Those smart people over at CB Insights put together a list of 100 Startups Using Artificial Intelligence to Transform Industries and 9 startups in that list fell under under “Conversational AI/Bots”:

Here’s how much funding each of these startups has taken in along with a brief description of what they do:

Now before we dig into each of these companies, please note that there have already been several acquisitions which show us just how eager big corporates are to get their hands on this chatbot stuff.

The first acquisition was San Francisco startup MindMeld which was founded 6 years ago and had taken in $15.4 million. The startup was running on an “Intel inside” business model that enabled any firm to integrate an AI powered conversational interface into their business processes. Just last month, Mindmeld was acquired by Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) for $125 million.

The second acquisition was Maluuba which was acquired by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) earlier this year for an undisclosed amount. This Canadian startup had taken in $8.2 million in funding and first crossed our path in late 2016 when we wrote about “Using Deep Learning to Teach Computers How to Learn“. Maluuba’s natural language understanding technology can already be found on over 50 million devices around the globe.

These acquisitions are a pretty good omen for the remaining 7 chatbot startups we’re going to talk about now.

A few months ago we wrote about The Top 10 Artificial Intelligence Startups in China and Mobvoi made that list. Mobvoi was founded by a couple of Chinese entrepreneurs who used to work at Google in Silicon Valley but then went back to Beijing and created an AI startup where 60% of the employees are engineers. We were particularly attracted to the beautiful smart watch they developed at a $200 price point that understands Chinese and probably some Engrish as well:

Just 3 days after our last article, Mobvoi took in $180 million in funding led by Volkswagen so now they’ve taken in $251 million total and are just shy of being a full fledged unicorn ($1 billion valuation). Mobvoi isn’t just about consumer gadgets since their core technology includes voice recognition, semantic analysis for chatbots, text-to-speech, and other such technology applications like a mobile voice search service called Chumenwenwen.

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