French startup Rounded launches AI voice agent platform to help enterprises customize voice interactions

French startup Rounded is working on developing an orchestration platform for AI voice agents, aiming to make it easy for enterprises to build their own voice agents. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, Rounded believes that AI voice agents will become the mainstream way for customers to interact with companies. Initially, Rounded's team tried to launch a Web3 product, but in June 2023, it switched to focusing on AI voice agents.

Rounded co-founder Aymeric Vaudelin said their initial idea was to combine ChatGPT with a transcriber and synthesizer to provide a valuable service. However, over time, the team realized that the market demand for voice agents was not yet mature. To address this challenge, they developed an AI voice agent called “Donna” designed specifically for the needs of anesthesiologists.

In France, before surgery, anesthesiologists need to communicate with the patient to ensure that the patient does not have an allergic reaction to the anesthetic drugs or potential complications. Anesthesiology secretaries tend to handle a high volume of telephone consultations, which are often simple and straightforward. For example, patients need to know the anesthesiologist's availability, make an appointment, or change the date of surgery. Therefore, the application of AI voice agents in this field is particularly suitable.

After multiple iterations, Rounded has successfully partnered with 15 private hospitals to use AI voice agents to answer calls and has processed hundreds of thousands of conversations. In order to improve user experience, Rounded continues to improve its products and reduce response latency, from the first few seconds to less than 700 milliseconds now.

Recently, Rounded expanded its business even further with the launch of an orchestration product that lets other companies customize their own voice agents. Through this platform, users can choose different AI models, such as speech-to-text models, language models, and text-to-speech models. Vaudein emphasized that Rounded's goal is to help users create high-quality prompts to build reliable AI agents.

So far, Rounded has received €600,000 (approximately $620,000) in funding from SkyDeck, a deep tech accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, and multiple angel investors. As the artificial intelligence industry continues to heat up, the startup is expected to attract more investment in the future.