speak2web: Voice and AI technology revolutionizing the web landscape

The voice technology market is currently dominated by digital assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri. But the voice technologies in existence are usually not integrated with their web presence. For instance, the widely popular digital assistants do not integrate into a company’s website and hence fail to offer robust solutions.

The chat bots and text-to-speech screen readers complete the conversational tech picture but let’s accept it, something’s amiss. There is a dearth of companies which address the real need of conversational web technology. speak2web is changing this.

Headquartered in Minneapolis, the cloud-based company is powered by employees who are also located in Ohio and Pune, India. With an expert team specializing in user optimization, market research, operations excellence, and solutions development, the company has a true understanding of what the market wants. They have been successfully translating the customer’s desire by blending their AI and voice technology via a SaaS model. The company has had a big start considering it was founded in 2018!

Currently, the company serves multi-billion dollar international corporations and also small home town businesses. We interviewed Walter Angerer, CEO and Founder of the company to know more about speak2web.

What was your motivation behind starting the company and how did it all come together?

The eureka moment happened one day when I was trying to talk to a digital assistant on a device after it had already directed me to a website. It wasn’t working and it just felt like these AI chatbots with billions of dollars of investments were a serious letdown.

The web wasn’t a part of the voice revolution and it became apparent that we urgently needed to change that. Even though the digital assistants can address simple needs like adding reminders to your calendar or sending a text to a friend, the web isn’t integrated into this experience. What was needed was a real AI with a language processing engine that could discern what people wanted when they spoke and subsequently responded in an intelligent way. So, we established speak2web to address this problem and take the web to the next level.

Who are some of your biggest clients?

Our largest client is a $4 billion dollar online distributor in the tech sector. We see the biggest traction with larger eCommerce clients. The pressure from online marketplaces like Amazon makes it difficult for eCommerce clients to differentiate and maintain a competitive edge. Using groundbreaking voice AI technology is one of the tools that allow them to differentiate. The usage of sophisticated AI technology allows them to serve their customers like no other player can.

And how is your company positioned in the current market scenario?

Our company is ahead of the curve with its products and approach. This puts our company into a position where we do not need to worry about competitors, but it also means that our clients need to first understand what we do since it is different to everything else they have seen so far. Therefore, our company is a trailblazer when it comes to adding Voice and AI to the web.

Tell us about the products and services offered by your company.

We offer access to AI and Voice Dialog to clients of all sizes. Some of our larger enterprise clients are looking for an entirely customized experience, including a deep integration into their backend systems. And we help them do this. By doing this, we provide our clients a completely new experience for their customers. Using our technology, for the first time, users can ask a regular question and the system will engage the full digital power of AI to find an accurate answer. With this technology, we are taking the web to the next level.

For smaller businesses, we offer a turnkey “DIY” solution that can bring a simple voice dialog and voice navigation to their webpage within minutes. Regardless of the size of the engagement, our team treats every request and feedback seriously, and we work hard to ensure that our clients and their customers will get the best experience possible.

Give us an instance where speak2web has done wonders for its client.

The biggest benefit of our technology can be seen in the large enterprise deployments. One of our clients carries several million SKUs from over one thousand different suppliers in their eCommerce store. So finding the perfect product can be a challenge for their customers, as they carry many variations of a similar product. Keyword search and elastic search are great tools, but are limited in their ability to help differentiate amongst similar products. With the help of AI and natural language processing, we have been able to take the customer’s experience to the next level.

Also utilizing the ability to understand the natural language query allows us to map relevant characteristics and parameters into parametric search fields that quickly take the user to a smaller list of products, which reflect a precise match of what they were looking for. Our next step with this client is to deploy deep learning and knowledge tree technology to go beyond the current filter and search capabilities of the system. Once fully implemented, this system will be able to find the proverbial needle in a haystack with a mind-blowing accuracy within seconds. This solution will be the first in this industry and will change the shopping experience for good.

What are the pain points of the industry addressed by your company and how does it differentiate the company and others in the field?

The most obvious pain point for companies is to efficiently and accurately convey their story to their audience. Today, companies attempt to achieve this by displaying headlines in big letters or by displaying images and flashing buttons to click. Yet the message is the same for everyone who visits the portal regardless of what the user’s questions or interests are.

But with our technology, by adding an intelligent voice layer to their portal, a user can state his/her question or interest in their first interaction with the webpage. Now that we know what the user wants, we can provide a targeted response back to the user, verbally as well as visually. We can quickly drown out the clutter and get the user the information they are looking for.

In addition, an intelligent AI dialog can guide a user by asking clarifying questions rather than presenting a large number of frustrating, irrelevant results and banners. Speak2web is solving many such issues with ease and is turning the web into something new. Users and customers can now get to their answers much quicker and with higher accuracy than before. We’re helping companies understand their customers much better than they did. With our technology, both sides are winning.

What is the road map ahead?

We just released the WordPress self-serve plug-in. Our next focus will be to proliferate the plug-in to other web technologies. Later in the year, we plan to release a voice-driven online market called Simon’s Market. Simon’s Market will be a 100% voice-driven virtual shopping mall where customers and clients can interact via voice with Simon, our virtual assistant, to quickly find what they are looking for.

The AI pioneer

Walter Angerer, CEO and Founder of speak2web

Seldom would you come across an individual who has pioneered AI as long as Mr. Angerer. Back when AI was just thought of as a concept for sci-fi Hollywood flicks, Mr. Angerer was pioneering AI and utilizing the technology. His work was especially crucial for electrical grids, so much so, that his contribution has played a huge role in how the modern SmartGrids are today.

Over the years, he continued to deliver innovative data storage products which increased company revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. This kind of success saw him get into leadership roles at high tech startups where he saw great success. In 2018, he founded speak2web and returned to his passion – AI.

Clients Speak

“I was surprised when I heard that we could add voice interaction to our Cutting Edge Gamer website using a WordPress plugin.  As our PC gamer customers all wear headsets, it was a natural fit to add search and navigation capabilities by voice. speak2web has helped us to create a more immersive website experience for our customers.  As one of their BETA customers, we always felt our voice has been heard when we needed changes, updates, or new features, and it has been great collaborating with speak2web with the direction of their product and helping to optimize its performance and customer experience.” – James Walsh, President & CEO of Cutting Edge Gamer

“I am excited about speak2web capabilities allowing WordPress websites to add speech and an AI assistant for interactions.  Any business website that is hit with many questions, can offer a unique leading-edge user experience with the speak2web plug-in.” – Mark Colestock WSI Internet Consultant

“We are speak2web. We came to bring the dreams of tomorrow – to life – today.”

“We believe that voice is the revolutionary next step in user experience optimization and immersion on the web.”