Five Companies Offering Conversational AI Solutions Named IDC Innovators

International Data Corporation (IDC) today published an IDC Innovators report profiling five companies offering conversational artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that assist enterprises in developing and deploying conversational applications, such as chatbots or voice assistants, which users can talk to via a text- and/or voice-based interface. The five companies are: Aisera, DRUID, Openstream, SoundHound, and Uniphore.

Conversational AI has seen a recent acceleration in adoption thanks to improvements in AI technology, as well as an increase in remote and distributed work, commerce, and education models. As organizations look to provide customers and employees with self-service options to answer questions and complete tasks, as well as help employees be more efficient and effective at their jobs, conversational AI is providing significant ROI across a wide variety of industries and use cases.

"The conversational AI market is crowded and competitive right now, with the past two years characterized by an increasing number of startups, open-source innovations, and acquisitions by major technology vendors," said Hayley Sutherland, senior research analyst for Conversational AI and Intelligent Knowledge Discovery at IDC. "Technology buyers considering conversational AI should familiarize themselves with the more innovative startups to get the full picture of what is available in addition to what they may be seeing from technology giants."

The report, IDC Innovators: Worldwide Conversational Artificial Intelligence (IDC #US47355221), features five companies offering conversational artificial intelligence solutions that address the growing needs of organizations to scale employee and customer self-service through conversational interfaces. The five companies are:

• Aisera provides multi-lingual conversational AI, leveraging technology innovations in natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge graphs to support IT, HR, customer service, sales, marketing, and finance use cases.
• DRUID offers a flexible conversational AI platform that includes ready-made virtual assistants with more than 500 pre-built intents and workflows for "industry-agnostic" business areas such as Legal, HR, and Finance.
• Openstream provides multi-modal conversational AI that can understand a wide variety of content types as input, including text, voice, touch, gestures, and video.
• SoundHound offers white-labeled voice-based assistants for major brands, featuring speech analysis technology that allows its conversational voice AI platform to quickly understand and respond to complex multi-turn, multi-slot queries.
• Uniphore is a provider of conversational automation, combining multi-lingual conversational AI capabilities with interaction analytics, RPA, and workflow automation to improve automation and agent efficiency, lower costs, and provide better customer experiences.

About IDC Innovators

IDC Innovators reports present a set of vendors ? under $100 million in revenue at time of selection ? chosen by an IDC analyst within a specific market that offer an innovative new technology, a groundbreaking approach to an existing issue, and/or an interesting new business model. It is not an exhaustive evaluation of all companies in a segment or a comparative ranking of the companies. Vendors in the process of being acquired by a larger company may be included in the report provided the acquisition is not finalized at the time of publication of the report. Vendors funded by venture capital firms may also be included in the report even if the venture capital firm has a financial stake in the vendor's company. IDC INNOVATOR and IDC INNOVATORS are trademarks of International Data Group, Inc.

For more information about IDC Innovators research, please contact Jen Melker at [email protected].

About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology, IT benchmarking and sourcing, and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights.