TalkIQ Launches With $7 Million And Speech Recognition Software It Says Beats IBM Watson And Google

WiFi company Zenreach is used to winning at least 60% of the time when it goes head to head with competitors. But when the 150-person startup went back and studied the conversations its sales reps were having with prospects, CEO Jack Abraham was confronted with a challenger beating his team 3 times out of 4. "We hadn't even considered them a competitor," says Abraham. "But when you can scan through all the instances a competitor is mentioned, it's easy to scan through what you're missing." The Zenreach sales team got that wakeup call courtesy of a new technology that launched on Tuesday called TalkIQ. Incubated out of Abraham's venture fund Atomic, TalkIQ is coming out of the gate with $7 million in initial funding from name-brand investors and speech recognition software for sales, customer service and onboarding that the startup claims is 2x better than IBM Watson and 3x better than Google. TalkIQ formed more than a year ago along the premise that if someone (or a machine) were to study every call made in a company, she (or it) could uncover patterns and insights to make the business run better--especially if you accept, as TalkIQ did, research that suggests that as much as 68% of customer interactions with company contact centers still happen by phone.