Witlingo is a McLean, VA Software as a Service (SaaS) company focused on enabling enterprises to deliver highly usable conversations with voice services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Samsung Bixby. The company positions itself as “the easiest way to launch an Amazon Alexa Skill/Google Assistant Action/Samsung Bixby Capsule. And from what we saw at VOICE Summit 2019, they may be on to something very special.
Witlingo announced the general availability of Buildlingo Community, a patent-pending based offering that enables businesses and organizations of all sizes to empower their customers and users to engage in Voice-First conversations through Amazon Alexa skills and Google Assistant actions deployed using the Building tool.
“Up to now, the focus in the industry has been mainly on enabling professional Voice First experience builders to easily create and deploy voice-first experiences, such as Amazon Alexa skills and Google Assistant actions,” said Ahmed Bouzid, Founder and CEO of Witlingo. “What we are doing with Buildlingo Communities is empowering the end user of these Voice First experiences to contribute to deployed Alexa skills and Assistant actions.”
Witlingo’s platform offers out of the box features like Here are some of the out of the box features: Outbound Notifications, Analytics and Discovery, Alexa skill Monetization, First Domain surfacing, Visuals displays, Ability to let your users share audio comments, Voice First Boards, and much more.
With the newly released Buildlingo Communities feature, anyone with an audience can now give that audience an opportunity to speak back. Dave Kemp, Business Development Manager at Oaktree Products and Hearables expert and evangelist, for instance, launched a companion Voice First channel to his daily Flash Briefing, Future Ear Radio, a microcast that touches on all matters Hearables.
Digital Marketing experts Mostafa Razzak, CEO of JMRConnect, and Susan and Scot Westwater, founders of Pragmatic Digital, are launching channels that engage with their respective prospects and customers. By combining Buildlingo’s Outbound Notifications and the new Communities capability, prospects and customers of JMRConnect and Pragmatic Digital will receive weekly notifications alerting them to important new content and soliciting feedback from them. “If you want to win new business or keep the customers that you have,” said Mr. Razzak, “you need to maintain a running conversation with them. You need to be top of mind with them when it comes to what you are offering, and a weekly notification via a cool technology such as voice assistants, with the added ability of prospects and customers to speak back, has the potential of creating sustainable meaningful engagement.”
One other company that really caught our attention was Aider, a New Zealand-based company, announced its entrance into the United States (U.S.) with authority by simultaneously unveiling integrations with Square, Shopify, QuickBooks Online and Amazon Alexa. What’s interesting about this artificial intelligence (AI) software company is its approach to empowering small business (SMB) owners with a central source from which to access the breadth of data from the many different applications used to run their companies.
Simply put, Aider is a mobile, digital assistant for smarter business. By connecting to the applications small businesses use every day to run their companies, Aider delivers easy access to answers about all aspects of business operations from a single source. Among the many different types of business applications with which Aider connects are: point of sale, accounting, payroll, rostering, online calendar, social media and analytics. Using Aider’s mobile app, questions are asked by typing, voice-to-text or speaking through a voice assistant, like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
Aider can answer hundreds of questions a business owner might have, including:
- “Hey Aider, how much revenue did I make this week?”
- “Who showed up for work today?”
- “Aider, get someone at Westpac to contact me” (coming soon)
- “How many Uber Eats sales have I made this month?”
- “What were my top selling products today?”
For small business owners, Aider provides immediate, easy access to business information in one place accessible simply by asking a question in natural language and enables fast, data-led decisions. Aider also proactively provides actionable insights based on custom business data so users can take action directly from Aider to improve their business
Constantly learning and growing its knowledge base, Aider can also schedule notifications and will deliver proactive trends analysis and benchmarking custom to the user’s business. Aider Founder and CEO, Brendan Roberts, took to the stage at VOICE 19 to address how voice technology and digital assistants can now cater to SMBs with technology typically reserved for high-end consumer and enterprise environments.
“We believe in human-centric AI and created Aider to give hardworking business owners easy access to the information they need to make daily data-led decisions. North America is the next destination on Aider’s strategic growth roadmap and with the help of our new partners, we will deliver AI-powered assistance to help thousands of underserved American small businesses address specific pain points and improve customer experience. Cash flow, time management and tedious administrative tasks are big problems for SMBs. Aider allows users to take immediate, direct action to improve their business. Our NLU (Natural Language Understanding) technology gives opportunities for SMBs to get easy, affordable access to answers from their data.”
With a vision to help change the dire reality of small business survival in the U.S., Aider solutions will provide better access to critical, up-to-date data by utilizing advanced AI and voice technology. Aider has received significant exposure lately on the tail of high profile announcements including being selected for Mastercard’s Elite Start Path program, a collaboration with one of New Zealand’s biggest banks, Westpac, and a partnership with New Zealand’s biggest payments company, Paymark.
For small business owners, Aider, accompanied by a voice assistant, allows them to have conversations with their businesses and harness the critical information needed to make smart decisions. With Aider, all they have to do is ask.
