What do AI voice agents and self-driving cars have in common? Their performance can be evaluated in the same way, argues Brooke Hopkins, a former tech lead at Waymo. Coval, Hopkins’ new startup, looks to do just that.
“When I left Waymo, I realized a lot of these problems that we had at Waymo were exactly what the rest of the AI industry was facing,” Hopkins (pictured above in the center) told TechCrunch. “But everyone was saying that this is a new paradigm, we’re having to come up with testing practices from first principles and that basically we all have to recreate everything. And I looked at that and said, wait, we’ve spent the last 10 years in self driving figuring out how to do this.”
In 2024, she decided to launch Coval, a platform that builds simulations for AI voice and chat agents that tests and evaluates how they perform tasks in the same way Hopkins tested self-driving cars at Waymo. Coval can run thousands of simulations simultaneously, like having the agent make a restaurant reservation or having the agent respond to a customer service question asked in an indirect way.
Coval’s tech evaluates the agents on a general set of metrics, but companies can also customize what they are looking for and use Coval to continue to evaluate for regressions. Users can also take this data, and the insights they gleam off of it, and bring it to their end-customers either for a demo or as a monitoring tool to show their customers the agent is …