By Kit Ng, 10 September 2022
Daisee, stands for Deep Artificial Intelligence Software for Enterprise Ecosystems, is a Sydney based Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company specialising in unlocking the power of conversation data to help businesses achieve better customer experience and compliance outcomes.
Daisee was founded by Richard Kimber in August 2017. Daisee looks to apply proven Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodology from leading universities to commercial opportunities and aims to make emerging technologies more accessible for medium to large businesses (Powell, 2018).
In 28 March 2018, Daisee ran its first funding round and has successfully raised AUD$8.8m 1. The seed funding was led by Alium Capital and contributed by Thorney Opportunities and other investors.
Daisee Essence ("Essence") is Daisee's recently launched flagship product. It is a conversational middleware 2 that automate quality assurance processes especially for contact centres. It aims to provide insights into each call drivers and seek to answer the question "why does the customer call?".
Essence combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI and Machine Learning. It works with both stereo and mono tone voice data.
- Transcribe : It first converts voice to text.
- Evaluate and Filter : Machine learnings is used to remove human bias and pre-conception to identify the meaning words and phrases from the conversation.
- Analyse and Categorise : AI and NLP are applied to analyse and recognise the meaningful phrases used on each call and categorise the calls, identify any trends.
- Insights and Reporting : Data produced by Essence can be exported to CSV to further perform advanced analytics.
Other products on offer include Programmable Quality Assurance Scorecard, Automated Script Adherece and Digitised workflow tool. Daisee products are cloud based and are provided to customers under subscription agreements.
Daisee solutions are industry agnostic and applicable to any sizes of contact centres in any industry. Daisee's current focused industries are insurance services, financial services, telehealth and medicine and debt collectors.
Daisee operates in several markets namely Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States and Canada. In 2021, Daisee generated more than USD$2m annual recurring revenue and it is looking to focus on its expansion on the Northern America market.
Other core metrics such as retention rate and dollar based net expansion rate will be useful to provide further insights into Daisee's subscription based business model. Information on these metrics are currently not publicly available.
In 2021, Daisee received awards for InsurTech and RegTech:
- ANZIIF Australian Insurance Industry Awards Finalist
- RegTech of the Year Australian Founded Award Finalist
Goorha, S and Iyengar, R believed that there are two core trends at the heart of the discruption around voice analytics:
- adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies that utilise AI and Machine Learning, and
- advances in pyscholinguistic data analytics and effective computing that allow for inferring emotions, attitude, and intent with data-driven modeling of voice.
The journey of voice analysis started from recognising digits, to a few words, to 1,000 words and to full conversation.
1950s - 1990s
In 1952, Audrey by Bell Labs was limited to accurately recognised only digits and could only be used for voice dialling. It was not until the 1970s, we have developed voice recognition technology that can mastered up to 1,000 words. In 1997, Nuance Communications first released Dragon Naturally Speaking, a software that could recognise and transcribe natural human speech without pauses.
2000 and Beyond
In 2011, Apple pre-installed its flagship smartphone with Siri, an intelligent virtual assistant. These days, we have voice activated home automation and voice assisted chatbots in call centres.
The advances in psycholinguistic with AI and machine learning further allow us to look into how words are spoken and looking at non-function words such as vocal bursts to identify emotion.
- Call Journey is another Australian-born conversation analytics provider. Call Journey recently releases updates to its speech analysis solution to include advanced customer interaction scoring and triage capabilities.
- VoiceBase is a US based AI-powered voice analytics company. VoiceBase offers voice analytics predictive software, combining the power of predictive analtyics and NLP. Its solution enables customers to setup custom predictors to detect and alert team member about key customer behaviour points.
- Deloitte TrueVoice combines the power of emotion and behaviour analytics and NLP. TrueVoice not only analyses what was said but how it was said. It analyses the acoustic properties of the call, such as tempo, amplitude, pitch, tone and non-semantic communication.
Short to Medium Term: Expanding into SupTech3
... attracting end-users likely won't be any easier as insurers shift their focus to immediate needs and expense management in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak.
Jim Eckonrode, Managing Director, Deloitte Centre for Financial Services, Beyond COVID-19: New Opportunities for fintech companies,
Daisee could consider partnering closely with the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) to enhance its solution for supervisory work. It could lead to new product lines and new customer segment.
Why would ASIC be interested?
There is enormous potential for regtech to improve the compliance outcomes for people. This fits in neatly with our objectives.
John Price, ASIC Commissioner, Panel Discussion at Financial Advice Files, 22 August 2019
With the exponential growth in data volume, regtech allows for real-time monitoring of vast expanses of information with greater efficency. Through the May 2019 ASIC RegTech Voice Analytics and Voice-to-Text (VA&VT) trial and symposium, which Daisee participated, ASIC has seen the potential of VA&VT technology reviewing larger volumes of calls than is manually possible. ASIC also noted that the solution has not yet able to fully replace current forms of monitoring of phone sales in the near team.
Long Term: Expanding through language adoption
Daisee could consider expanding its voice analytics to cover more languages (currently English only) and perhaps local dialects within larger countries. It could open new segments of customers especially Asia.
Footnotes
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https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/daisee/company_financials ↩
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Middleware is software that acts as intermediary among two services or applications. ↩
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Supervisory technology, also known as suptech, refers to the benefits of using regtech in supervisory work. ↩