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Yactraq has invested over several years into the speech based semantic platform they call Coretraq. The key benefit of their patented and award winning (Gartner Cool Vendor – Core AI) technology is that it allows the mass customization of speech platform vocabularies in a very quick and cost-effective manner. Where legacy technology requires very expensive large scale human labour, Coretraq largely automates such work and allows Yactraq to deliver solutions to even 10 seat call centers for less than a thousand dollars a month! Customization is key to driving accuracy and B2B2C speech products like Coretraq need to deliver 95%++ accurate data so customers can confidently trust the information and take decisions based on it.
Below is our interview with Jeh Daruvala the Founder & CEO of Yactraq:
Q: What is the story behind Yactraq, how did you start?
A: Well you could say the story of Yactraq began in my early childhood. I was endlessly fascinated by Isaac Asimov’s books about robots and spaceships and working on building them was all I ever really wanted to do. My first encounter with speech technology began as an engineering intern at Unisys where I worked on speech synthesis. The experience made a deep impression and challenged me to work with AI technology. A couple of decades later I founded Yactraq with the desire to pick up the speech tech thread. Initially we worked on applying speech based semantics to media applications like ad targeting and video search, where we found some success but later realized the more immediate opportunity is in speech analytics for call center applications.
Q: You’ve recently announced partnership with AppConnect; could you tell us something more?
A: Sure. AppConnect is the worlds first enterprise app store, offered by Yactraq’s partner Talkdesk.com. Talkdesk is a very successful, fast growing San Francisco based vendor of cloud based call center infrastructure like call switching, recording, workforce management etc. For speech analytics Talkdesk has chosen to partner with Yactraq. This creates a new revenue stream for Talkdesk in an area like speech analytics which is closely related from a business perspective and yet is a specialized technology domain. From Yactraq’s perspective our partnership with Talkdesk gives us scalable market access.
Q: You also offer several other useful features like diarization; tell us something more?
A: Correct, diarization allows Coretraq to automatically split mono call recordings into agent side vs customer side via anonymized voice printing technology. This is important because advanced platforms like Talkdesk that record calls in stereo are still the exception. Most call recording systems out there today are mono.
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Q: Who are the primary users of Yactraq and what are some of the key challenges you are helping them solve?
A: Industry verticals like Finance, Retail and Travel are early adopters of advanced CRM technology and speech analytics is a example of advanced CRM because it allows our clients to listen closely to the Voice-of-the-Customer and also to increasingly automate the process of evaluating their sales and customer service call agents. Financial services customers also benefit by using speech analytics as a compliance tool.
Speech analytics has historically been a very expensive product. Only Fortune 1000 CIO’s with capex budgets of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars could afford it. Yactraq on the other hand democratizes access to speech analytics so even small and medium businesses and enterprise business units of any size can now benefit from speech analytics. And we do all this while offering the latest in neural network driven speech engines fully integrated with natural language understanding, custom vocabularies and other custom business intelligence features.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Given our investment into our Coretraq speech based semantic platform and into building relationships with call center related decision makers, Yactraq is well positioned to deliver Conversational Computing solutions for Virtual Customer Agents (VCA’s). We believe customization is also key to delivering a great VCA user experience and the technology Yactraq has developed gives us a strong capability in Conversational Computing as well.
