MEET THE COMPANIES GIVING VOICE TO AI BOTS

Cloud telephony firms are cashing in on demand for automated customer care by making AI voices sound natural

- Shadma Shaikh

(From left) Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO of Gupshup, and Shivakumar Ganesan, founder of Exotel.

A rather frustrated and impatient customer called Decathlon’s helpline one afternoon to ask about a delayed order, demanding an update.

The voice at the other end, which began the conversation in English, switched to Hindi upon hearing the customer and assured him that the package would arrive in two days. The update seemed to calm the customer, who said “Thank you, madam” to the agent before hanging up.

There was only one thing off in what otherwise turned into a smooth call: the customer's assumption of the agent's gender. The voice was not female; it belonged to an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice bot.

That human-like bot was built by Yellow.ai, which manages sports goods retailer Decathlon’s voice and chat AI, while the conversation itself—including how the call connected, streamed and was recorded—ran on virtual telecom operator Exotel’s cloud telephony network.

“Earlier, our interactive voice response (IVR) could deflect about 25% of our calls. With voice AI, that’s gone up to nearly 55-60%. Customers get the right information faster and our agents can focus on real issues,” says Dominic Raju, customer support project manager at Decathlon.

‘Deflect’ here means that the voice AI agent is able to solve the query and it doesn’t need to be transferred to a human agent.

The bot now handles everyday queries such as ‘where is my order’ and ‘when will I get my refund?’

Like Decathlon, enterprises across sectors—from e-commerce companies handling delivery queries to banks chasing loan repayments—are rushing to automate their call centres with voice AI. It's an exercise that involves replacing or augmenting human agents with AI agents that can speak in multiple Indian languages, understand context and respond without any robotic delay.