Just as you expected, privacy has become a luxury good. Smart home device maker Josh.ai has found that high-end buyers will pay extra for a privacy-safe alternative to voice-activated devices from Google and Amazon. Josh just raised an $11 million Series A.
ASAPP, which uses artificial intelligence to advise customer service and sales agents on what to say next, has raised a $185 million Series B, bringing total funding to $260 million. The system uses a combination of speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning. It’s a reminder that lots of money is spent on customer experience outside of martech.
Shopify already offers one-stop tech shopping for small retailers. They just went a step further to add a mobile shopping app that covers everything from local business discovery to product recommendations to checkout to order tracking. Good timing.
CX management platform Sprinklr is introducing “digital twins.” Not your average chatbot, a Sprinklr digital twin is more like an AI-powered employee, able to plan actions, create workflows and make decisions, but at speed and at scale. They are said to be more easily trained than chatbots and can operate within brand policies and guardrails.