Artificial intelligence startup Replicant Inc. today said it has raised $7 million in seed funding for its customer relationship-focused voice response technology and appointed a former executive from contact center unicorn Talkdesk Inc. as chief executive.

The San Francisco-based company said its automated assistant can carry on complex and detailed conversations with customers with response times that approximate those of a human agent. The product of two years of development, the software integrates with customer relationship management systems from Salesforce.com Inc. and Zendesk Inc. for automatic call summarization and can be customized to take actions according to a company’s policies.

“We spend time with customer and managers, listen to calls and understand the calls they don’t like,” said new CEO Gadi Shamia, former chief operating officer of Talkdesk. “Those are calls where we perform best.” The software has been able to field calls up to eight minutes long, he added.

The company says its technology, which it calls “Thinking Machine,” understands full sentences and becomes more functional with use. It can retrieve customer information from internal databases, create tickets and transcribe conversations for analysis.

Among the routine tasks Thinking Machine can handle are updating shipping addresses and issuing refunds. Rules can be defined to pass calls to an agent along with a bullet-point summary of the progress of the interaction to that point. Replicant also provides a dashboard that enables contact center managers to monitor dozens of parallel conversations in real time.

The technology is entirely homegrown, including a telecommunications stack, with much of the work emanating from a team at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Shamia said. The company has no large deployments yet, but it’s ramping up with one customer whose contact center employs 2,800 agents who collectively field 50,000 calls per day, he said.

The funding round included participation from Atomic Management LLC, Bloomberg Beta L.P., Costanoa Venture Capital Partners LLC and Norwest Venture Partners. Funds will be invested primarily in engineering, sales and professional services.

Image: Wikimedia Commons