Data is accelerating across the internet and many other channels, with audio, video, and text based channels are growing faster than ever. From a business intelligence perspective, applications of harnessing this data include Voice-of-the-Customer, Media Monitoring, Competitive Intelligence, and Brand Sentiment.

Yactraq is a pioneer in providing deep business insights through audio mining and speech analytics. Recorded phone calls as well as video contains valuable information related to Voice-of-the-customer, Compliance and Quality. But in order to be effective, B2B speech based semantic systems need custom vocabularies that include not just industry specific but customer specific terms. Yactraq’s patent pending and award winning machine learning technology allows them  to deliver custom vocabularies orders of magnitude faster and more cost effectively than legacy approaches.

Yactraq’s offering makes audio mining economically attractive for small customers as well as functionally specific applications within large customers. Their patent pending and award winning CoreTraq engine uses a Yactraq proprietary fusion of speech recognition and natural language understanding to deliver an integrated picture of both speech and text based semantic data either to their OmniTraq business intelligence layer or to any custom application for analysis or search.

A creative player of Yactraq

JehDaruvala, Founder and CEO of Yactraq, has over 24 years of entrepreneurial, investment banking, product management, business/systems analysis and advisory experience in Information Technology at startups, Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft, T-Mobile, TELUS, Avendus Advisors, and Gateway Capital. Currently,Jeh’s primary focus is his role as CEO at Yactraq, an IPFD partner of multi-billion dollar IntellectualVentures, the world’s largest patent bank. Yactraq wasselected as a Gartner Cool Vendor 2016 in the Smart Machines category, Yactraq is also among the first 20 companies showcased in  IBM Watson’s Cognitive Gallery.

Before migrating to  Canada in 2002, Jeh played a key role in incubating Customer Asset, an India based IT infrastructure services, venture that evolved into the $300 million, Firstsource Solutions. While working on Delsys, his first startup, Jeh sold the first-ever Ethernet switch in India (Cisco).

Jeh has a Masters in Management Studies (Finance) & a Bachelors in Engineering (Electronics) from Bombay University. He is also a lifelong human spaceflight enthusiast and believer in  technology innovation as the key driver of corporate and economic growth.

Intelligent Infrastructure for Contact Centers

Yactraq’s technical capability isbased on CoreTraq, a proprietary and patent pending speech based semantic platform. CoreTraq’s custom vocabulary capability is available as an API or via a user interface (OmniTraq). Additionally, Yactraq is an IP-For-Defense partner of Intellectual Ventures, which uniquely positionsYactraq in the Speech Tech industry and provides Yactraq with an unparalleled freedom to operate and bring disruptive solutions to the market.

They have built  custom vocabularies with taxonomies like Open Directory, as well as customer specific target taxonomies & lists. Taxonomic data is first used to generate search terms, then standard web crawling techniques and API’s are used to collect web pages of related linguistic data. The taxonomic and linguistic data is then provided as system data to Yactraq’s NLU (Natural Language Understanding) module. Data from the NLU module is then exported out and further provided as input to a machine learning process. The output of Yactraq’s machine learning process is provided as input to a set of tools which generate a statistical language model for use by Yactraq’s speech engines.  Yactraq also uses audio transcripts in its machine training process.

The present version of CoreTraq has been proven across approximately five million minutes of phone calls and videos, and delivers high levels of metadata accuracy.  This validates that Yactraq’s patent pending process, as described above, can generate custom vocabularies that are orders of magnitude faster and more cost effective  than legacy approaches.

Future Prospects

Yactraqbelievesthe heart of product marketing strategy in the high-tech Startup context revolves around managing technology risk.  Only businesses that take on technology risk can manoeuvre into a position of strategic surprise through the release of disruptive products. But innovation of this nature while necessary is far from sufficient to drive business growth, which also depends on time-tested business execution tactics, & principles such as a focus on customer value delivered through a cohesive team.  An AI software business is after all still a business, not a government or corporate R&D lab. Negotiating the contradictions between these diverse domains is, they  believe, essential for succeeding as an innovative technology business.

Yactraq  delivers  Intelligent Infrastructure for Contact Centers. Apart from speech analytics, the other key product Yactraq is presently working on is Virtual Agents for customer sales & service oriented call centers. Conversational computing is an exciting new area within AI and while the talking computers of science fiction in the shape of C3PO or Jarvis may not be achievable in 2017, Virtual Agents for call centers are very much a practical reality today, both in terms of technology and business value.  Virtual Agents can take over repetitive tasks from humans, thereby allowing businesses to deliver more and better service within the same budget. Virtual Agents can also grow sales bandwidth for a business, without the linear cost increase of hiring more people.  Existing IVR technology is essentially obsolete because it gives full control of the interaction to the machine, which is wasteful and therefore disrespectful of a customer’s time. Virtual Agents allow customers to assume control of the interaction and create a browsing experience without the pressure of dealing with an outcome driven human salesperson.

The key to quickly and cost effectively building successful virtual agents is also to customize them on a client by client basis. Yactraq is again investing into their  key asset of custom vocabulary driven speech based semanticcapability to deliver Virtual Agents.

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