By will-buy
Voice services provider Native Voice has closed a $14 million seed funding round led by Gutbrain Ventures, PBJ Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures. Native Voice provides on-demand access to branded voice assistants without requiring the typical intermediaries of Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant.
Branded Access
Native Voice streamlines how users pull up apps and services by cutting out the need to ask a native voice assistant or perhaps tap on a mobile app. For example, a person could launch a Spotify playlist by saying “Hey Spotify,” then get open Uber to get a ride by saying “Hey Uber,” all without needing to tap around the device or ask a voice assistant to deal with it. The library of brands includes the standard phone voice assistants, so that you can ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant questions. The idea would be to shorten the entire process of asking one voice assistant to open an application and operate it or having to tap on a screen if your voice assistant lacks certain capabilities inside the app you need to use.
“Brands like Bank of America and Spotify are investing millions of dollars in building their own voice service (hey Erica and hey Spotify), but it's hard for them to get to the 400+ audio device brands available,” Native Voice founder and CEO John Goscha told Voicebot within an interview. “You want to scale our organization to offer instant, touchless access across every brand in each and every vertical. Voice is not just for music, news, podcasts, radio, weather, fitness, and meditation anymore.”
Funding Libraries
Native Voice aims to utilize essentially any device with microphones and speakers, including smart speakers and displays, cell phones, wearables like earbuds, and inside cars. The company looks to include every major brand coming out with voice services, including Starbucks along with the aforementioned Uber and Spotify. Having the ability to use all of the several voice services of multiples companies without switching accounts or navigating a touchscreen will probably appeal to users and thus towards the brands it is working with, which include several unannounced fitness, tech, and retail brands.
“The brand new money is to propel the company onto more devices, expand our growing library of voice services and prove and scale our business design,” Goscha said. “These investments are helping our team build the woking platform to provide our users what they need from all brands and in turn help those brands without a voice service realise why voice is core to the future development of their business.”
