Anyone who has interacted with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana when things get muddled knows how frustrating they can be.
Startup Wluper, which recently raised $1.3 million in seed money, believes that you can make conversational AI more effective by simply narrowing its focus.
More on Wluper from this report in Innovation Enterprise:
Wluper’s AI voice assistant system is built on the premise that voice assistants work best when their use is narrower and more target-driven as opposed to broad-use AI voice assistants which have gained popularity in recent years. Speaking to TechCrunch, Wluper co-founder Hami Bahraynian said: “When we think of intelligent assistants like Alexa or Siri, the only time you’ll believe they’re really good is if they understand you properly; most of the time, they simply can’t.
“It is not the speech recognition which fails. It is the missing focus and lacking reasoning of these systems, because they all can do a lot of things reasonably well, but nothing perfectly,” he added.
In order to achieve its aims, Wluper is building voice assistants for very specific tasks such as navigation, which is what the startup was originally building when it was founded in 2016 with the help of InMotion Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s VC company. This allows the team to make educated assumptions about the types of questions the AI is going to asked and allow it to more naturally respond to queries.
Wluper’s seed round was led by IQ Capital, Aster and Magic Pony. Wluper said that the funds will be used to hire more staff and expand R&D.
