NLX in the news
The Information: Falling AI Costs Mean More Call Center Automation
NLX CEO Andrei Papancea spoke with The Information's Jon Victor for his Applied AI newsletter about how falling AI model costs could impact customer service automation.
From the newsletter:
As the cost of running high-quality AI models falls, one application that is becoming more affordable and reliable is AI-powered customer service voice agents. Most customer service still happens by phone, and the latest voice modes of popular chatbots like ChatGPT show the technology is capable of carrying on complex verbal conversations. [...]Companies that sell technology for automating text-based customer service, including Zendesk, Intercom and OpenAI, have all introduced products that handle voice. But Andrei Papancea, CEO and co-founder of NLX, a provider of text- and voice-based AI customer service software, said adoption of phone call automation is still behind text-based conversations because voice “can get prohibitively expensive.”Papancea said costs for voice-based AI are falling, thanks to innovations like DeepSeek’s R1. That will make it easier for NLX and other providers to add AI voice support, he said. While businesses have long used more basic automation for phone calls (like asking a caller what type of query they have, or asking for their account number or birth date), the latest models would handle a wider range of support cases.