- Conversational AI technology company Gridspace announced new emotional intelligence capabilities for its virtual voice agent Grace.
- The update enables Grace to respond more swiftly and empathetically, and enhances the agent’s ability to express its own emotional states.
- Gridspace made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York.
Voice technology and AI software innovator Gridspace unveiled new emotional intelligence capabilities for its virtual voice agent Grace. The new capabilities enable Gridspace’s voice agent for business to respond faster and more empathetically to the speaker’s emotions. The enhancements also improve Grace’s ability to express its emotional states.
“Grace’s new emotional intelligence capabilities make voice calls with Grace even more natural,” Gridspace CEO Evan Macmillan said. “We are excited to further advance customer satisfaction with voice agents and make it even easier for businesses to deploy them.”
Bringing emotional intelligence capabilities to voice agents is a major advance in spoken dialog systems, according to Gridspace. Because so many contact center interactions involve customers experiencing frustration, being able to respond appropriately is paramount. Grace’s enhancements will enable the voice agent to manage more complex interactions with greater nuance, and also act as a buffer for high-volume contact centers. To this point, human agents working with Grace have reported not only being able to spend more time on complex calls, but also are experiencing less stress, lower burnout rates, greater productivity, and higher job satisfaction.
Founded in 2012, Gridspace made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022. The California-based company was created through a collaboration between SRI Speech Labs – the entity behind Siri – and a diverse team of designers and engineers. Gridspace has been innovating in fields such as high-performance voice telephony, automated speech recognition (ASR), hyper-realistic TTS (text-to-speech), low-latency spoken dialog systems, as well as tools and solutions to help institutions deploy and manage conversational AI.
Gridspace has raised more than $27 million in funding and includes Private Investors and USAA among its investors.