Srikanth
What was the thought behind Mihup?
I was always in awe of my mother who had an impeccable understanding of people. She used this ability to build relationships through effective communication to run orphanages in Cooch Behar, the place where I grew up. From an early age, I wanted to create a platform which could allow people to talk with anything and everything including fans, refrigerators, two-wheelers, cars and home automation systems etc.
Tapan Barman Co-founder and CEO with his childhood friend Biplab Chakraborty who is now the COO and Co-founder of Mihup. Both of us have been friends for over 30 years, and we studied in the same school as well as college. Thus, we collaborated and once the idea took shape, we started looking for funds. It was during this process that we met Sandipan Chattopadhyay, the third partner of Mihup’s founding team. We shared the concept with him and he liked it. This was what led to the inception of Mihup in 2016.
What is Mihup’s proprietary platform ?
Mihup Communication Pvt. Ltd is a fast evolving, trusted and accurate vernacular voice interface platform. It enables enterprise developers to create customized voice interfaces. The platform offers the users complete control over their brand identity and data privacy. Mihup has created 3 products which are built on our proprietary platforms of (a) Speech to Text (b) Natural Language Processing (c) Dialogue Manager (d) Text to Speech. Our Voice AI products cater mainly to the contact center and automotive space, with the potential to be incorporated onto any platform. These products are:
- VIA (Virtual Interaction Analyst) – It can analyse all inbound/outbound customer interactions to generate actionable business insights
- AVA – Call Center (Automated Virtual Agent) – It facilitates automated and accurate management of customer queries through a human-like AI interface.
- AVA – Auto – It is an unmatched multi-language vehicle AI assistant which offers various features such as car control, media and entertainment.
How is Mihup transforming the conversational AI sector?
Mihup is making a great impact in the conversational AI sector through its superior outcomes compared to other products available in the market. The technology came to India a little later, and the global brands find it challenging to deal with the linguistic diversity of the country. That’s where a purely Indian brand such as Mihup is creating the perfect solutions for various industry verticals such as FMCG, media, e-commerce, food-tech, logistics, automobile, and many more.
Mihup is changing the way people interact with machines. The company leverages advanced NLP and AI tools to deliver unprecedented accuracy and customer satisfaction. We are constantly striding forward in our aim to create a seamlessly interactive environment by integrating humans and machines.
What are the USPs of the company?
Mihup is the new frontier in Conversational AI. Our platform enables enterprise developers to create customized voice interfaces with full control over brand identity and privacy. Our interaction analytics solution provides 100% analysis of a call center’s customer interactions to derive actionable insights to improve sales, collection and customer services. We are an enterprise ready platform for both native cloud or edge deployments. Our USPs would be –
- Industry Leading Accuracy
- Mixed Language Support
- Platform Agnostic
- AI on the edge
- Customisable Engines
- Low Carbon Footprint
What are Mihup’s future plans, partnerships?
Mihup is committed to transforming the way humans interact with machines. Our company’s ability to leverage NLP and AI tools to solve for India is going to contribute towards turning India into a global voice automation powerhouse in the years to come. The Hon’ble Prime Minister envisions making India a digital and technology superpower.
As the country is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the PM has unveiled his mission for ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ wherein India will become self-sufficient and a global supplier for all things including technology. As a transformational start-up developing completely home-grown conversational AI tools, Mihup has a lot of potential to contribute to this cause.
We offer unmatched automation driven by the native Indian languages and this ability can make Indian businesses thrive in the years ahead. As of now, we have partnered with Tata Motors to bring digital transformation in the hands of the Indian driver and the product is already present in some of their top end versions of cars like Nexon. We are also going live with our product in Tata Trucks this year. Along with this, we count private sector banks, fintech players and unicorns in various sectors as some of our top partners in this journey of automation and transformation.
What kind of funding has Mihup received so far?
Mihup recently raised 1.5 million in the Series A round led by Accel Partners, Ideaspring Capital, leading investor Rajesh Jain’s firm Core91 VC and Jayant Kadambi (Founder and CEO YuMe Networks). Earlier, we had also secured seed funding and pre-Series A funding from Accel Partners and Ideaspring Capital.
What is the future of automated voice interface?
Future is limitless for a revolutionary technology like this. Mihup is already seeing great potential for in areas ranging from automobile to healthcare and FMCG. For instance, the voice AI in customer service is efficiently reducing the workload on human agents by handling routine and standardized queries, registering complaints, providing information on demand.
In a car, the drivers can simply converse with the vehicle’s AI assistant in their native language like Hindi and instruct it to perform functions like temperature change, make a call, and play music. We are already seeing how big home automation as well as smartphone AI assistants have become. There is definitely an incredible future for the automated voice interfaces in the post-COVID world.
How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the industry?
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of automation and digital adoption across the board. People are working remotely and demand for contact-less intuitive technologies based on edge computing, cloud networks and smart devices is increasing rapidly. This is where the ability to automatically converse with machines, and get tasks done faster and better is coming into focus. Statistics suggest that the global speech recognition market size is projected to reach $29.28 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 19.9% from 2019 to 2026.[1]
How can Interaction Analytics lead to Customer Service Transformation?
Mihup’s interaction analytics solution has incredible benefits for customer service operations and the technology can completely transform the user experience. Some of the salient features of the platform are:
- 100% analysis of all customer interactions through voice and chat
- It can be deployed on edge as well as cloud platforms
- The platform supports multiple languages such as English, Hindi, Bengali and the mixture thereof
- The system offers actionable and accurate insights which can boost sales, collection and customer service operations
- The customers get better support and it can help in superior customer retention as well.
When analysing 100% of its interactions, an organization ensures that all customer/agent behavior/product/operational concerns are proactively handled. Actionable business insights emerge from customer interactions whereas manual analysis does not allow users to consume insights from these. On the other hand, sample-based analysis is biased, half-baked and even misleading. To understand what customers are talking about and reduce their pain points, 100% interaction analytics is imperative. All of this will further lead to improved CSAT and reduced escalations.
