For enterprise house owners, cellphone calls could be an infinite time waster. Take the restaurant business, for instance. Calls can result in extra necessary duties being missed, like doing stock, balancing workers schedules, working payroll and fixing gear points. The problem, exacerbated by the pandemic, is so extreme that eating places are more and more abandoning their cellphone traces.

Alex Sambvani and Gabriel Duncan, who met whereas working at Spotify, got down to clear up the issue of overwhelming incoming calls utilizing AI, drawing on their backgrounds as information scientists. What emerged from their joint work is Slang.ai, a platform that robotically solutions the cellphone for eating places, retailers and different forms of brick-and-mortar companies.

“Slang acts like a dependable workforce member that provides correct responses and helps drive extra income, giving companies AI superpowers and empowering them to offer distinctive service to callers and streamline operations in a personalised method,” Sambvani informed TechCrunch through electronic mail.

In plainer, much less jargony and fluffy English, Slang acts as a type of digital cellphone concierge that solutions questions and takes — or modifies — reservations, together with OpenTable and Resy reservations through integrations. Utilizing Slang, callers can e-book or modify reservations and even merely let a enterprise know that they’re working late.

Picture Credit: Slang.ai

Companies can determine which calls Slang handles robotically versus fingers off to workers. Sambvani claims that Slang’s computerized speech recognition works for callers of all ages and understands completely different accents — a powerful feat if true, given computerized speech recognition tech’s traditionally poor dealing with of various dialects.

“Many brick-and-mortar companies are understaffed, inflicting them to overlook calls and ship potential clients to voicemail the place they lose out on potential income,” he continued. “Slang supplies its shoppers entry to beforehand unknown information about why clients are calling … [And it] can floor trending the explanation why clients are calling and may also help operators proactively establish alternatives or points, resembling a location getting an irregular quantity of complaints relative to different places.”

Slang isn’t the one startup promoting a imaginative and prescient of tech to chop down on pointless cellphone interactions. There’s Goodcall, which gives a free cloud-based, AI-powered conversational platform to handle incoming cellphone calls. Kea is constructing phone-answering AI particularly for eating places. So is ConverseNow, whose AI voice assistants take orders in fast service eating places through the cellphone, chat, drive-thru and self-service kiosks.

So what does Slang carry to the desk that units it aside? A big buyer base, primarily, In keeping with Sambvani, Slang has over 200 shoppers in the present day, together with Slutty Vegan, Palm Home Hospitality Group, Studs, Planta, Hammitt and Nikki Seashore Miami. Income grew 6x in 2022.

Picture Credit: Slang.ai

That success led traders to pour $20 million into Slang — $8 million as part of a seed spherical and $12 million in a Sequence A. Homebrew led the latter with participation from Stage 2 Capital, Wing VC, Underscore VC, Energetic Capital and Collide Capital.

Sambvani says that the proceeds might be used to ascertain new partnerships and integrations within the restaurant, hospitality, retail and ecommerce industries, develop Slang’s go-to-market workforce and develop headcount from 18 staff to 40 by the tip of the yr.