Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company's valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch. New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were joined by existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital. Talkdesk uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service for midmarket and enterprise businesses. It counts over 1,800 companies as customers, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago and Fujitsu. "The global pandemic was a big part of how customers interact and how we interacted with our customers, all working from home," Paiva said.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Talkdesk, which provides an enterprise contact center platform, today announced that it raised $230 million at a post-money valuation of $10 billion. The round, which came from Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management, Alpha Square Group, Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors, and Willoughby Capital, brings the company's total raised to $498 million to date. Over the past several years, businesses have increasingly turned to cloud-based contact centers to address budding customer service challenges. The pandemic accelerated that move -- service conveniences were put in place out of necessity, which gave customers more options for interacting with companies. For example, 78% of contact centers in the U.S. now intend to deploy AI in the next 3 years, according to Canam Research.

San Francisco-based Talkdesk also hired its first chief financial officer, Sydney Carey, who had been CFO at Sumo Logic Inc., a cloud-based data and analytics company. Talkdesk plans to devote the new funding to purposes including research and development and adding executives and other staff, said Chief Executive Tiago Paiva. "It is really to be able to spend more time with customers, build more products, and also make sure we have the team ready to support them internationally," Mr. Paiva said. Talkdesk is part of a growing industry called contact-center-as-a-service, in which companies apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance clients' customer service and customer experience. Such cloud-based contact center software also makes it easier for call-center agents to work from anywhere, as opposed to monitoring calls physically on a company's data and communication network in onsite offices.

A year since making its formal move into artificial intelligence, with the introduction of an inside sales-oriented tool, cloud contact center provider Talkdesk today turned our attention to the AI-infused customer experience it envisions for the future. At the center of its latest AI initiative is Talkdesk iQ, a combination of new products and features for the company's Enterprise Contact Center Platform. With Talkdesk iQ, companies can draw customer insights and trends out of interactions taking place via the Talkdesk contact center platform, described Tiago Paiva, Talkdesk CEO, in unveiling the AI capabilities today at the company's annual customer and partner conference, Opentalk 18. Talkdesk iQ can help turn the insights into actions, driving predictive recommendations that should lead to better customer engagements while optimizing agent and contact center efficiency, he added. Talkdesk, plain and simple, is a data company, handling some 1.5 billion interactions annually, Paiva said. And from that data, Talkdesk can help customers make smarter decisions about all things contact center-related.

When I was 15 I discovered The Smiths, a band whose name had by then long been synonymous with misery. But it was Morrissey's unique style of being miserable – coquettish and laced with Northern English humour, flipping between self-pity and irony – that appealed to my teenage self. I'd always cry at the same points in each song: the end of Hand in Glove, the chord changes before the chorus of Girl Afraid, the line in The Queen is Dead where he sings "we can go for a walk where it's quiet and dry". I'm still not sure why the last one had such an effect. Two decades later, Spotify has built an algorithm that aims to quantify the amount of sadness in a music track.

This paper envisions a future where autonomous agents are used to foster and support pro-social behavior in a hybrid society of humans and machines. Pro-social behavior occurs when people and agents perform costly actions that benefit others. Acts such as helping others voluntarily, donating to charity, providing informations or sharing resources, are all forms of pro-social behavior. We discuss two questions that challenge a purely utilitarian view of human decision making and contextualize its role in hybrid societies: i) What are the conditions and mechanisms that lead societies of agents and humans to be more pro-social? ii) How can we engineer autonomous entities (agents and robots) that lead to more altruistic and cooperative behaviors in a hybrid society? We propose using social simulations, game theory, population dynamics, and studies with people in virtual or real environments (with robots) where both agents and humans interact. This research will constitute the basis for establishing the foundations for the new field of Pro-social Computing, aiming at understanding, predicting and promoting pro-sociality among humans, through artificial agents and multiagent systems.

We are looking at new ways of building algorithms for synthesizing and rendering animation in social robots that can keep them as interactive as necessary, while still following on principles and practices used by professional animators. We will be studying the animation process side by side with professional animators in order to understand how these algorithms and tools can be used by animators to achieve animation capable of correctly adapting to the environment and the artificial intelligence that controls the robot. Figure 1: Two example scenarios featuring a touch-based Robotic characters are becoming widespread as useful multimedia application, sensors, and different robots.