TechCrunch |
- Google starts prompting remaining Hangouts users to move to Chat
- The VC who helped incubate Discord has quietly spun up an autonomous contact center startup
- Proptech still has fundamental problems for entrepreneurs to solve
| Google starts prompting remaining Hangouts users to move to Chat Posted: 27 Jun 2022 10:23 AM PDT Google has announced that starting today, people who are still using Hangouts on mobile will see an in-app prompt asking them to move to Chat in Gmail or the Chat app. The company says the new prompt will help remaining users move to Chat as Google works toward officially shutting down Hangouts in November. People who use the Hangouts Chrome extension will be asked to move to Chat on the web or install the Chat web app, the company says. In July, people who use Hangouts in Gmail on the web will be upgraded to Chat in Gmail. Google notes that although it encourages everyone to make the switch to Chat, Hangouts on the web will continue to be available until later this year. Users will see an in-product notice at least a month before Hangouts on the web starts redirecting to Chat on the web.  Image Credits: Google The company says although conversations will automatically migrate from Hangouts to Chat for most people, it encourages users who want to keep a copy of their data to use Google Takeout to download their data before Hangouts is no longer available. “Google Chat offers a modern and integrated experience in Google Workspace,” said Ravi Kanneganti, a product manager at Google Chat, in a blog post. “We have big ambitions for the future of Chat, and over the coming months you’ll see even more features like direct calling, in-line threading in Spaces and the ability to share and view multiple images. As we take this final step to bring remaining Hangouts users to Chat, we hope users will appreciate our continued investment in making Chat a powerful place to create and collaborate.” Google says that moving to Chat will give users a better way to connect and collaborate with others. It notes that users can edit Docs, Slides or Sheets with side-by-side editing. Chat will also give users access to Spaces, which is a dedicated place for topic-based collaboration. Users will also get access to @mentions to notify someone in the group and will also have the ability to send GIFs. Today’s announcement comes as Google said in October 2020 that it would let everyone migrate from Hangouts to Chat for free. Chat was originally meant to only be its Slack-like messaging service for business users, but has since become free to use for consumers. |
| The VC who helped incubate Discord has quietly spun up an autonomous contact center startup Posted: 27 Jun 2022 09:58 AM PDT Customer service is a huge industry. Meanwhile, across many sectors, employees remain hard to find, so it’s no surprise that a lot of startups have emerged to help companies offer a better experience for their customers through advanced tech; there’s money in them thar hills. Many have begun to turn to chatbots, but these rely on a so-called manual flow, in which case a kind of decision tree is created by populating conversational blocks that help the bots fulfill customers’ requests based on certain triggers. The bots typically buy the company time while allowing it to gather information that can, in some cases, lead to a human interaction (assuming the issue can’t be solved at some point along the way). But it can require a heavy lift in the form of costly professional services. Now, a startup called Got It AI is emerging from stealth mode with claims that it has a whole new way of helping its customers centered on dialogue. Silicon Valley investor Peter Relan, who helped incubate the company in 2018 (he also helped get Discord off the ground and served on its board until 2020), likens it to a “fully autonomous” call service center. Led by David Chu, who worked previously with Relan and Discord founder Jason Citron at Citron’s first company, Open Feint, the startup is targeting small and mid-size companies that don’t have the time or people or financial resources to design the manual processes that fuel their chatbots. Relan says that they simply port both voice and chat log conversations into the platform and it immediately, based on that data and the magic of natural language processing and machine learning, can begin communicating with customers. He compares it to the GPT-3 bot that was used a couple of years ago to emulate someone’s dead fiancée based on old texts and Facebook messages she had written and he fed into the platform. Got It AI isn’t the only autonomous contact center that goes beyond what conversational AI software can do. Replicant, for example, is a startup that promises its AI voice agents can handle complex, nuanced conversations in real time, using what it says is human-like inflection and speed. (Replicant, founded five years ago, has raised at least $113 million in funding from investors.) Still, Relan naturally insists that Got It AI — which has quietly raised just $15 million to date across two rounds that he has led — has the best tech available right now; he also says the company has a strategy on which it is beginning to execute, now that it’s feeling confident about its offering. The partnership strategy centers on lining up partnerships with makers of cloud contact center software, like Five9, NICE and Twilio, given they are “not companies that have amassed the AI talent to pull off” what he says Got It AI, which employs around 30 people, has managed. The company’s direct, go-to-market strategy centers on selling directly to outfits like current customers Indiegogo and the baby brand Frida, which are using Got It AI’s omnichannel software-as-a-service offering to largely answer email, along with compound questions about content like articles. Indeed, beyond targeting small and mid-size companies, Got It AI is primarily targeting e-commerce companies with digital-first customer service AI (in addition to those voice-first contact center companies like Twilio that haven’t yet adopted conversational AI in a meaningful way). As for the guardrails needed to ensure these autonomous conversations don’t land a company in hot water, Relan says Got It AI invites its enterprise customers to set the tone for the customer service conversations. It also works with them to establish so-called hyper parameters based on its confidence that a customer complaint can be resolved completely autonomously. Says Relan, “If the confidence is lower than [100%], you can set the parameter to say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Can you repeat that?’ And if that happens two or three times, it says, ‘Let me get you further assistance'” and a human steps in. As with all AI, Relan insists that Got It AI is getting smarter as the conversations it absorbs keep changing and it keeps updating both its own style and the outcomes. “The virtual agent improves itself,” Relan says. |
| Proptech still has fundamental problems for entrepreneurs to solve Posted: 27 Jun 2022 09:30 AM PDT Over the last decade, one tech sector that affects everyone's quality of life — from where we live to what we put in our homes — has come a long way. Proptech has made our lives easier with innovations like smart homes, AirBnB, and the ability to shop for and secure a mortgage from our phones. But major gaps, and opportunities, remain. For example, the single-family residential market is enormous. Approximately $2 trillion worth of homes were sold in 2021, per CoreLogic. But buying a home is still an excruciatingly difficult process. A team from Keller Williams identified 180 things a seller's agent does, and even this list, as exhaustive as it is, does not fully account for the many other players in a typical transaction. Today, buying a house is a lot like running the steeplechase: you have to sprint between obstacles and pray you have the stamina to survive it all. It should not be this hard. So let's fix it. This is a call to current and would-be proptech entrepreneurs to solve the problems that are close to home. There has arguably never been a better moment to get started. Capital is searching for good ideas and quality execution. In 2021, venture capital poured a record $11.7 billion into proptech. While the market has started to slow down this year, driven in part by factors such as public market performance, inflation, and higher interest rates, there is still strong investor appetite for great and novel ideas with excellent execution.
If no one can find your house online, is it really even for sale? Starting a business is hard, but we now have a path for proptech, lined with funders and advisors, that can propel entrepreneurs over early obstacles through to maturity and deep market penetration. Proptech can solve many fundamental homebuying issuesProptech still has fundamental problems to attack, including one of the most common: purchasing a home. Below are eight high-leverage homebuying pain points that have not been sufficiently addressed. Because of the enormity of the housing industry, even marginal improvements in some of these areas will be greeted enthusiastically, and big leaps forward will be handsomely rewarded. Housing affordabilityThe challenge: Many Americans cannot own a single-family residence, regardless of how long and how wisely they save. High construction costs, strong demand pushing up prices on relatively low supply, and low incomes can make homeownership difficult or impossible. This is not a problem solely for lower-income households. The National Association of Realtors' Housing Affordability Index, which measures the degree to which a family with the median income can afford monthly mortgage payments on a median-priced home, fell 30% between April 2021 and April 2022. Housing is taking up a greater percentage of Americans' income. |
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