French startup Rounded believes AI voice agents are going to become the default way customers interact with companies, so instead of building AI voice agents that are ready to use, the company is building an orchestration platform that lets companies build their own voice agent.
Rounded started off working on a web3 product before shifting its focus to explore AI voice agents in June 2023. “The idea was that we’d simply put ChatGPT after a transcriber and before a synthesizer, and it would be valuable,” co-founder Aymeric Vaudelin (pictured above, first from left) told TechCrunch.
But the team soon faced the usual product-market fit conundrum. “After a few months, we realized that the market wasn’t ready yet to hear about voice agents. So we created a product, and packaged everything to create a first agent,” Vaudelin added.
That effort resulted in Donna, an AI voice agent for anesthetists. While that seems a bit random, the startup picked that market because anesthesia secretaries have to deal with a large number of patients, and it’s usually a very transactional experience.
In France, when you schedule a surgical operation, you have to talk to the anesthetist beforehand so they can make sure you don’t have any allergies to anesthetic products or any potential complications.
Anesthesia secretaries have to handle a large volume of calls that are pretty straightforward. Typically, people just want to know when the anesthetist is available, schedule an appointment, or change the date.
Moreover, these aren’t sales calls, so an AI agent doesn’t have to be persuasive or extremely efficient. “In the early days, we struggled with latencies of sometimes 4, 5, 6 seconds,” Vaudelin said.
Nevertheless, with Donna, Rounded managed to convince 15 private hospitals to let an AI voice agent answer calls, and the company says the agent has handled hundreds of thousands o …