Voci Raises $3.12 Million to Expand Customer Base

Voci Technologies announced that it has secured $3.12 million in financing, led by the Pittsburgh Equity Partners, with participation from existing investors including BlueTree Allied Angels, Carnegie Mellon University, and Innovation Works.

The company introduced the world's first commercial speech recognition appliance, V-Blaze, last September. The system has roots in early work on accelerated speech recognition done at Carnegie Mellon. Voci's implementation extends the technology using patent-pending techniques to overcome deficiencies that have hindered the academic approach for commercial applications. V-Blaze accurately converts audio files to text orders of magnitude faster than any other speech recognizer, auto-transcribing 100 hours of live audio in one hour, and delivers scanning of up to thousands of words at over 300 times real time, according to the company.

Voci empowers enterprises to monitor customer interactions while the customer is on the call, initiating real-time alerts for intervention to address customer problems, prevent fraud, and improve cross-selling based on live conversations. The Voci recognizer's speed coupled with an affordable price lets enterprises analyze 100 percent of the recorded call center data to derive Voice of Customer insights to improve operations.

"Voci has produced impressive results in a short period," said Steve Robinson, managing partner at Pittsburgh Equity Partners, in a statement. "We see tremendous growth potential for speech recognition in the enterprise analytics business and for Voci in particular due to their differentiated solution and high-caliber team of entrepreneurs."

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