As the leading Voice AI solutions provider in Southeast Asia that helps businesses automate their communications with customers remotely, AI Rudder has been working with businesses to address their common challenges during the pandemic.

By Kun Wu, Co-Founder & Managing Director, AI Rudder

Over the last two years, businesses across all industries have digitized rapidly to keep up with evolving consumer demands. In Southeast Asia alone, 70 million people became digital consumers, signaling the appetite for digital-centric consumption, such as online shopping.

How has the pandemic impacted AI Rudder’s business?

The pandemic also meant that more people had to work remotely. This proved to be a turning point for many businesses as they acknowledged that they had to look beyond traditional ways of operations to align with shifting consumer habits. For instance, many businesses faced the challenge of managing their contact center operations at a time when it was not possible to host a team of agents under the same roof.

This made the challenges of running a call center more pronounced, forcing businesses to seek new avenues to sustain their call center operations.

What insights did you get over the last two years?

The pace of digital transformation has accelerated across industries, and together with it, AI adoption has skyrocketed as the technology becomes increasingly more sophisticated. We learnt that the digital economy today has become extremely competitive – especially for frontier industries such as fintech and e-commerce, where there is a saturation of businesses seeking to expand their market share.

In this landscape, speed is a key differentiation for businesses looking to stand out – customers today want fast, frictionless experiences while interacting with brands and services – these are factors that can make or break a business. Be it in the fintech or e-commerce space, we continue to see how voice AI technology offers the possibility of facilitating interactions that are more valuable, simple, intuitive and personalized for the customer.

In the fintech space, more consumers are opting for digitized and personalized services, such as contactless payments and digital banking services. More businesses are recognizing how they can tap on Voice AI to perform various functions — from payment collection and customer signups to verifying information for loan approvals or purchases.

About one in two companies plan to adopt the technology, such as virtual assistants, speech analytics, voice biometrics, RPA and predictive analysis in the next 12 months. For e-commerce players, voice AI can help automate and resolve basic, time-intensive shopper queries in real-time, allowing businesses to streamline the manpower required for such repetitive tasks.

How has AI Rudder's journey toward being accredited by Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) been and what are some learnings and areas of growth?

As a startup headquartered in Singapore, we received a lot of help and guidance from IMDA. IMDA Accreditation aims to accelerate the growth of innovative Singapore-based enterprise tech companies through establishing credentials, build business traction, and compete in the global market as more opportunities are created for their products to be showcased and bought.

Throughout the accreditation process, we worked closely with IMDA and maintained an open dialogue to share our business, technology and product updates. Over the past twelve months, we reached several milestones, placing us in good standing to receive the accreditation.

Our partnership with IMDA puts us in a good position as we plan for the next phase of our growth, following our Series A funding round last November, led by Sequoia, and our Series B financing with Tiger Global, Coatue, and Cathy Innovation earlier this year.

We made substantial breakthroughs on the technology front and are now supporting more than 16 languages. In addition to being the best AI for talking to customers, our product line has also expanded to support an omnichannel AI customer engagement portfolio, including a predictive dialing system, quality assurance, chatbot and inbound customer service.

We recently expanded our operations beyond ASEAN and have established our presence in countries such as South Korea.

How has being enrolled under IMDA Accreditation program benefitted Al Rudder?

Being formally accredited by IMDA has helped to establish our credentials and we can position ourselves as qualified enterprise software providers to businesses. Being accredited can also help allay doubts and uncertainties consumers have around the use of voice AI technology.

Voice AI technology is still very much in its nascent stage, particularly in markets where consumers are more resistant to the adoption of new technologies. We hope that IMDA’s accreditation program can bring voice AI to the mainstream market, allowing businesses to leverage voice AI technology as the tool that could disrupt the traditional call center business model and deliver quality customer experience at scale.

Is it possible to share some exciting use cases from AI Rudder for this article?

Indonesia-based digital credit company JULO struggled to cope with a surge in customer inquiries – with millions of customers across the country – until it found a solution in voice AI. JULO enlisted the use of our voice AI to automate its quality assurance processes.

Voice AI assistants handle customer call logs in real-time to detect anomalies such as abusive language and non-compliance with regulatory requirements. Of the 5,000 daily recordings processed, only about 50 are brought to the attention of the quality assurance manager for further investigation and analysis.

This has vastly improved the efficiency of JULO's quality assurance department while improving the overall job satisfaction of human agents. Another Indonesian company, Toyota Astra Finance, has also been experiencing high call volumes since the start of the pandemic.

By using our voice AI for loan collection, the company has freed up its collection agents to handle more complex issues that require a human touch while leaving high-volume repetitive tasks to voice AI. As a result, the team has been able to significantly improve the call center's contact rate and efficiency and extend operating hours without incurring additional costs from overtime.

Tell us more about the technology behind AI Rudder’s voice AI.

AI Rudder uses automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and lifelike text-to-speech (TTS) to process conversations, receive and interpret customer intent, and communicate at scale to a level of near-human intelligence.

With more than a decade of experience in the AI industry, our team continuously improves the performance of voice AI by training it with industry-specific data for various scenarios. Further, 99 percent of users and customers are not able to tell the difference between a live agent and a voice AI assistant.

Today, our platform supports more than 16 languages and plans to roll out new languages every quarter to better support multinational companies operating across different countries. While our focus is on Asian languages, we are also working on spoken languages more commonly used in other parts of the world.

For many such languages, AI Rudder provides the market with the best conversational voice AI capability for customer engagement.