Three ex-Google engineers have banded together to launch what can only be described as a sort of replacement for a human PA, but one which can be used by a whole company to improve communications across the board.
Bellgram literally tracks conversational data and applies AI to it to enhance how the business operates. The startup has already won Lyft, Woopra, OnFleet and other companies as customers and raised $800K from seed and angel investors including Arzan Venture Capital, 500 Startups and SGH Capital.
Bellgram claims that its first version allows its users to switch on a voice activated virtual assistant during a phone call. Users can ask the Bellgram assistant to set up meetings and add them to people’s respective calendars. It can also take meeting notes, transcribe them and email them to the attendees. The tool collects all relevant conversation data including message history, voicemail, call logs and recordings, then indexes them and makes them searchable. Bellgram also uses historical data for predictions and suggestion purposes. The technology, says the company, can predict what contacts a user should be calling next, based on their calendar entries and a combination of other signals and patterns.
Bellgram was created in July 2015 when co-founder Will Kanaan realized, after many years working as a business executive, that phone and message apps do not offer integrated communications. too much information is spread around.
Bellgram is available for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows, and offers its users a web admin dashboard for data monitoring and analytics of conversation data.
Kanaan said in a statement: “Your mobile device is by far what receives most exposure to your work day. We believe that it should be more reliable than the best personal assistant, who literally doesn’t miss a word of what you say, hear or write in a meeting or call.”
Bellgram can integrate with productivity tools such as Slack, Salesforce, Google Suite, MS 365 and others.
Andrew Travis, VP of Sales at Onfleet said: “We’ve been using Bellgram for over 6 months and immediately saw an increase in productivity for our customer-facing teams. Bellgram is seamlessly integrated into Salesforce, works perfectly across devices, and has a feature set and user interface that makes adoption a breeze. Hands down best in class.”
“Bellgram is the first phone option I’ve seen that satisfies the needs of the whole sales organization. Whether you’re in sales operations, management, outside or inside sales, it’s going to make your life easier,” said Michael Raab, Head of Small and Medium Businesses at Lyft.
The company says it is in conversation with several large Saas businesses in various sectors to integrate Bellgram’s solution with their suite of work tools.
Competitors include Skype for business, MS Lync and Cisco Spark. A few startups have copied the same concept with and improved UI and UX such as Dialpad. Voice transcription competitors might include Real speaker, Trint and Happy Scribe, but Google assistant, Alexa, Cortona and Siri remain the leaders. Voice capturing for calls and video conferencing competitors include Gong, TalkIQ, ExecVision and others.
Bellgram is attempting to take all of these on. It will be interesting to see how it fares.