French startup Rounded is working on developing an orchestration platform for AI voice agents, aimed at enabling businesses to easily create their own voice agents. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, Rounded believes that AI voice agents will become the mainstream way for customers to interact with companies. Initially, the Rounded team attempted to launch a Web3 product, but shifted their focus to AI voice agents in June 2023.
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Aymeric Vaudelin, co-founder of Rounded, stated that their initial idea was to combine ChatGPT with transcribers and synthesizers to provide valuable services. However, over time, the team realized that the market demand for voice agents was not yet mature. To address this challenge, they developed an AI voice agent named "Donna," specifically designed to meet the needs of anesthesiologists.
In France, before surgery, anesthesiologists need to communicate with patients to ensure they do not have allergic reactions to anesthetics or potential complications. Secretaries in the anesthesia department often handle a large number of phone inquiries, which are usually simple and straightforward. For example, patients need to know the anesthesiologist's availability, schedule, or change surgery dates. Therefore, the application of AI voice agents in this field is particularly suitable.
After multiple iterations, Rounded successfully partnered with 15 private hospitals to use the AI voice agent for answering calls, handling hundreds of thousands of conversations. To enhance user experience, Rounded continuously improves the product, reducing response latency from several seconds initially to now under 700 milliseconds.
Recently, Rounded further expanded its business by launching a platform that allows other companies to customize their own voice agents. Through this platform, users can choose different AI models, such as speech-to-text models, language models, and text-to-speech models. Vaudelin emphasized that Rounded's goal is to help users create high-quality prompts to build reliable AI agents.
So far, Rounded has secured €600,000 (approximately $620,000) in funding from the SkyDeck deep tech accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, and several angel investors. With the ongoing growth of the artificial intelligence industry, this startup is expected to attract more investments in the future.
