Hold the phone: Startup Dialpad bets voice AI is key to transforming the front office ZDNet

An especially hot area of enterprise software in recent years has been the front office, functions such as sales and support. There is a rush to transform the entire "go-to-market" process, and more recently, that raging market has collided with another very hot industry, the Internet voice services that replace phones with cloud-based communications. Throw in a little artificial intelligence, and what do you have? A San Francisco startup called Dialpad, founded in 2011, is trying to transformer customer support, sales, and marketing with a bit of machine learning and a lot of data. The company has received $120 million in financing in four rounds from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.