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.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is definitely the "in" thing right now in the tech world. It seems like there is a new startup spinning up every day. And yes, many existing companies are re-branding themselves as AI operators. The irony is that this technology has been around for decades -- but it is only recently that it has gotten traction. Then again, there has been a convergence of various technologies that has made AI a reality.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is definitely the "in" thing right now in the tech world. It seems like there is a new startup spinning up every day. And yes, many existing companies are re-branding themselves as AI operators. The irony is that this technology has been around for decades -- but it is only recently that it has gotten traction. Then again, there has been a convergence of various technologies that has made AI a reality.

Dialpad CEO Craig Walker, left, is joining forces with TalkIQ boss Dan O'Connell. Artificial intelligence is one of Silicon Valley's favorite buzzwords. Artificial intelligence, specifically in how it can quickly analyze the human voice, is at the core of Dialpad acquiring TalkIQ in a deal announced on Wednesday. Both startups had gotten some buzz in recent months, but Dialpad, the acquirer, was far bigger, having raised $70 million and carrying a valuation of about $250 million, according to PitchBook. TalkIQ had raised about $22 million in funding.

There is no argument about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is coming. It is here, in automobiles, smartphones, aircraft, and much else. The question now moves to how broadly AI will be employed in industry and society, and by what means. Many other companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, also already offer AI tools which, like Google Cloud, where I work, will be sold online as cloud computing services. There are numerous other AI products available to business, like IBM's Watson, or software from emerging vendors.

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.