OTO Raises $5.3 Million in Seed Funding to Launch Voice-Intelligence-as-a-Service

OTO, a platform provider for real-time speech analysis, has raised $5.3 million in funding from Firstminute Capital, Fusion Fund, Interlace Ventures, SAP.iO, and SRI International.

Powered by artificial intelligence and vast amounts of speech intonation data, OTO provides enterprise customer service operators with emotionally smart tools that include real-time behavioral coaching, automated quality control monitoring, and dynamic customer satisfaction scoring.

"We are building the next generation of speech technology to humanize conversations by unlocking the trove of behavioral insights found in our daily communications," said Teo Borschberg, co-founder and CEO of OTO, in a statement. "We're finally emerging from the research phase and are thrilled to be deploying our technology in the [United States and European Union] to help enterprises better understand human behaviors like engagement, interest to purchase, and satisfaction."

Powered by a proprietary Emotion Dataset that consists of more than 100,000 utterances from 3,000 speakers and insights learned from 2 million sales conversations, OTO is pioneering the first multi-dimensional, hyper-personalized conversation system.

"With the release of DeepTone, our new deep learning framework for acoustic modeling at scale, we can now deploy language-agnostic models that further improve over time through supervised learning on NPS/CSAT labels and unsupervised learning on raw human emotions in enterprise datasets," said Nicolas Perony, co-founder and chief technology officer of OTO, in a statement. "Through our plug-and-play platform, enterprises can leverage OTO to provide agents with real-time coaching and automating parts of quality assurance."

Prior to launch, OTO tested the product with 1,000 agents and more than 1 million sales calls. Agent engagement scores improved by 30 percent and sales conversion improved by 10 percent. Extractions from intonation allow for more transferable and generalizable insights across languages and context than via text-based methods.

"The OTO founding team is a great balance between deep tech and go-to-market," said Brent Hoberman, general partner of FirstMinute, in a statement. "They can both build and sell the product, while also driving longer-term research that will maintain their technology lead."