It's been five months since we had Dialpad on the UC Today podcast, discussing their acquisition of TalkIQ. As I was in San Francisco for the week, I caught up with Dan O'Connell, former CEO of TalkIQ and now Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad, to see how the transition has unfolded and what the plans were for blending the two products together.
How the deal unfolded
With no intention to sell the business, the attention from Dialpad was a flattering yet completely logical step for TalkIQ. Rather than fighting an immature market space, in voice AI, it made complete sense for the niche provider to move into the Dialpad portfolio.
Dan knew Brian Peterson, Dialpad Co-Found and VP of of Product and Mobile Engineering, from their days together as senior engineers at Google. As every good business deals start, the two former colleagues went for a beer and the rest is history. With Dialpad's existing portfolio of Dialpad business phone system, UberConference and Call Centre, the VoiceAI becomes a powerful addition to the suite. Baking in VoiceAI to the phone line provider made sense for both companies. TalkIQ no longer need to rely on forward thinking business in a niche market. Dialpad bolster their already impressive portfolio with a true differentiator.
Since the announcement, TalkIQ has migrated 95% of its existing workforce over to Dialpad. Seamlessly, engineering rolled into engineering and design rolled into design.
VoiceAI
The VoiceAI product is the next step in real-time speech recognition. Technologies like natural language IVR and speech recognition are now fairly mature in the Unified Comms industry. However, just because vendors have this tool in their armoury doesn't mean customers are adopting it.
Dialpad's ideal customer for the VoiceAI product is a client facing team, ready to invest in tools to that drive ultimate productivity. Features such as real time transcription, voicemail transcription and sentiment analysis are standard items within the VoiceAI product.