Welcome to the age of real-time behavioral analytics, courtesy of Uniphore.

As tech companies shed people and assets in anticipation of hard economic times to come, “Conversational AI” provides a ray of sunshine. It provides enterprise customers with hope that new technologies can improve their customer experience, employee performance and bottom-line results. That is the logic fueling Uniphore’s two recent acquisitions: Red Box, a venerable, call recording and screen recording specialist, and Hexagone, a French startup specializing in the field of behavioral analytics.

Not counting the acquisition of the Spanish Emotion Research Labs in 2021, our story starts on February 2 with the acquisition of Red Box, whose products evolved from voice recording to a platform capable of capturing both the voice and screen recordings of 100% of conversations in ways that comply with today’s data sovereignty laws. Roughly a week later Uniphore completed its acquisition of Hexagone. The combined technologies complement Uniphore’s X Platform of Conversational AI and automation resources “fusing” voice and text-based conversational data with visual and tonal metadata to derive insights that foster better understanding of each customer and agent’s mood or disposition.

As Derek Top noted in this post, Uniphore’s Q for Sales marks a successfully integrated real-time analytics engine for tonal and emotional states displayed during video sales meetings. To provide such services, Uniphore had already incorporated technologies from its 2021 acquisition of the aforementioned Emotion Research Labs, which uses computer vision for real-time facial expression to help a sellers’ ability to derive a metric called emotional quotient (EQ).

Expanding Regions, Departments and Verticals

With Red Box and Hexagone, Uniphore is buying more than pure technology. In addition to its rock solid approach to data sovereignty, Red Box brings Uniphore an impressive installed base of customers in the UK and Western Europe serving clients that span the trading floors of financial services companies and government agencies operating public service contact centers for emergency services. These industries have long been required by law to record 100% of all conversations. The need for high EQs and tone-awareness in these settings is self-evident.

For Uniphore, making the jump from voice and interaction analytics to full-blown behavioral analytics is proving to be a successful strategy. By at least one account, the company saw a 9x increase in its top line revenue and achieved profitability for its fiscal year ending in March 2022.  Co-founder and CEO Umesh Sachdev has long taken the view that his company’s expansive view of “Conversational AI” defines a unique market opportunity. Through internal development and acquisition of technologies that capture all conversational data and metadata in real time and augment with metadata that includes visual and tonal cues, he is delivering technologies that help enterprises retain customers and make employees more efficient (or at least empathetic).

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: speech analytics, AI, chatbots