Symbl.ai is Five Years Old Today
Today marks five years since we started Symbl.ai to change how businesses adopt AI and transform experiences centered around human conversations. We are grateful to our developer community, partners, and customers who recognized the unique value of conversation understanding and played a pivotal role in the progress of our industry. The rapid evolution in the AI ecosystem continually fuels our passion at Symbl, and keeps us constantly pushing forward. As we celebrate our fifth anniversary, it’s fitting to pause, look back on our journey, and share our exciting vision of the (near) future.
In 2020, the launch of our self-service developer platform revolutionized real-time AI experiences by providing streaming and async intelligence for key insights in conversations. Then, we introduced the groundbreaking Summarization API, enabling the generation of meeting summaries and short thematic summaries. This breakthrough powered automated note-taking and capturing key moments in real-time. Our release of Trackers empowered customers to semantically and contextually search for different intents, phrases, and themes, leading to applications such as live NPS tracking, intelligent call routing, and real-time assistance. With the feedback from the builder community, we evolved our developer platform with SDKs, a new playground experience, new docs, and a managed library of over 50 intents within the trackers, solidifying our position as an industry leader.
Now, we are on the verge of unlocking the next generation of conversation understanding in a whole new way to elevate human performance, and the best is yet to come.
Going Beyond Transcription
Symbl was one of the first companies to democratize business-specific understanding of conversations via our API platform. We’ve had the privilege to work at the forefront of how AI is used to accelerate outcomes and performance for business conversations. During this time, developers, customers, and partners were wowed by transcription as a new and exciting way to deliver improved human conversation results. The world has changed a lot since then. Exciting new applications of generative AI unlocks deep conversation understanding and supercharges human performance. At Symbl, we’ve been at the center of this innovation since the beginning and we’re more excited than ever to be at the center of this revolution!
Unraveling the Complexity of Conversations
Understanding conversations is comparable to peeling an onion. It has multiple layers that we may not fully realize, and our understanding depends on the outcomes we aim to achieve. The main problem arises when there is a miscommunication between what is said and how it is interpreted. This issue becomes more significant as it happens on a larger scale during multi-party and virtual conversations, leading to stagnant business growth and increased customer turnover. However, by aligning people’s understanding of the intended meaning, eliminating biases in interpretation, and preventing information loss, we can enhance human performance and generate value at every step.
At Symbl, we are dedicated to innovating and discovering the various layers of intelligence within conversations that directly impact business outcomes. This includes organizing unstructured conversation data, uncovering new insights, extracting essential information and actions, identifying intents and their relationships to other aspects of the conversation, understanding emotions and sentiments, and ensuring the identification of personal information for security and compliance purposes. By tapping into this knowledge in real-time, Symbl empowers businesses to improve their outcomes more rapidly than ever before.
The Best Communication Experiences are Built
Programmability has been core to Symbl since our inception, and we know that today’s builders are not limited to developers. AI evolution will give rise to Builder 2.0, a creative thinker, problem solver, and visionary, irrespective of software-building skills or knowledge. Personalized workflows and applications will be built with machine learning and natural language. Every business will deliver unique value to their customers in every human interaction.
Business-Ready Approach to AI that Makes Humans Smarter
We understand that the journey to perfecting AI that can understand human conversations better than humans is a marathon, not a sprint. This means delivering targeted, business-ready solutions that bring immediate value to businesses while paving the path for advanced achievements.
Building products that can be rapidly adopted at large scale has enabled us to deliver meaningful value to our customers without extensive upfront training cycles. This involves focus on domain specificity, low latency, optimizing for memory, building with foundations for privacy, security, and bias mitigation at the core. Building the AI infrastructure from the ground up also enables us to automatically tune the system with feedback specific to businesses and deploy it in their own cloud infrastructure.
Symbl: What to Expect in 2023
Staying true to our core mission to provide the most advanced AI platform for identifying and generating deeper conversation understanding to elevate human performance, we’re excited to rollout a series of new updates throughout 2023 that focus on:
- Rapidly incorporating domain and business-specific processes and knowledge to deliver highly contextual insights
- Increasing the depth of intelligence, expanding value with real-time and asynchronous AI
- Building blocks and experiences to reduce time to value for specific roles and business outcomes
- Access to core AI models for developers to unlock greater creativity in application building
We are extremely excited to share what’s in store.
Community and Collaboration
Humans speak and interact in business processes differently compared to how they write or comment on posts. Business conversations are highly contextual to business goals, with multiple participants, defined by objectives (or not), and involving several modalities. Models built for general-purpose text understanding often struggle to deliver accurate and predictable understanding of human dialog without continued fine-tuning.
To truly comprehend the nuances and subtleties of human conversation, AI systems should be built and evaluated on multiple other foundational and emergent abilities, such as reasoning, adaptation, context, memory, and domain specificity. We believe in the power of collaboration and community involvement. While these are challenging problems, achieving true understanding of multi-party natural human conversations will be a collective effort, and we’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries to unlock iterative value for businesses that can scale.
Onwards and upwards
We are tremendously grateful for the customers, partners, employees, and the wider community for being a part of this incredible journey. At Symbl we thrive on the responsibility to continually deliver innovation centered to amplify human interactions.
We look forward to continuing to work together towards a future of limitless possibilities.
