Elerian AI Uses Deepgram for Accurate Accents in South Africa
TRANSCRIPT
Elerian AI
Craig Akal, Co-founder and Director
My name is Craig Akal. I’m one of the founders of Elerian. What we are now is a business that has very deep natural language understanding capability, and this gives us the ability to deliver a human-like interaction when people talk to our technology.
Our solution has a number of core components. The first being is the ability to transcribe the user’s utterance or caller’s utterance into text so that our system can then make sense of that. That speech recognition bit is obviously what Deepgram’s specialty is. We don’t have that capability ourselves. So we looked globally for the right partner in Deepgram after looking at various solutions we found was the best fit for us. It helps us get the precision that we need in transcribing different accents and dialects.
So I’ll give you an example of that in South Africa where we’re doing our first deployments. There are eleven different official languages. So English is obviously spoken with an array of different accents, as I say, different dialects. And so it’s been important for our customers or the customer care centers that we’re deploying to, that we have a sample of the whole spectrum of the kind of people that can be pulling in. We need to not just have the dialogue put through the models, but we need to also have samples of the accents and dialects, and jargon that the models are gonna see in real life. So training with audio is critical for us to deliver the agent that we’re they’re trying to deliver. With experience, we’re trying to deliver, and Deepgram’s solution was the only one that we found that was able to do that, to customize with audio.
Not only is Deepgram’s technology the most advanced we found, but working with them has been an absolute pleasure.
People don’t want to talk to robots. They want to feel if they are talking to a digital agent that it’s a natural interaction. So not only is Deepgram’s technology, the most advanced and suitable that we found, but working with them has been an absolute pleasure. Their team is proactive. They’ve assisted us in the learnings that are required around the integrations of the technology. They’re marketing team has been really proactive in obliging in working with us on webinars, joint blogs, access to their sales team, and really just generally helping us with aspirations for that deployment into the US.