Zammo brings conversational AI, cross-platform voice apps, and chatbots to customers with Microsoft Azure Cloud Services

Diedrich Espresso, a 17-store coffee chain in Western Washington, is known for great coffee and quality in every cup. “My mission is to serve you the perfect beverage every single time,” says owner Jasmine Diedrich. With no IT staff, the local coffee company did not have the same resources as a technology powerhouse—but that didn’t stop Diedrich from making her shops easy to find for java lovers on the go. In just one day, she implemented a voice bot to help existing and prospective customers find the nearest locations in a hands-free manner. “We’re bringing Diedrich’s into 2020,” Diedrich said when she first tried her new voice app, built with Microsoft and Zammo conversational AI technology.

With voice technology experiencing explosive growth, businesses like Diedrich Espresso can easily engage customers through a voice presence on mobile phones and smart speakers. Zammo, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, uses Azure and Azure Cognitive Services to make it simple and cost effective for organizations of all sizes to build enterprise-level, cross-platform voice applications with no coding experience.

Voice apps are the “new frontier”

Whether it’s a COVID-19 inspired desire to touch things as little as possible, the multitasking demands of work, home, and school life, or the simple convenience of hands-free control, more people are turning first to voice to find information and make purchases. AI industry expert Bradley Metrock recently shared a report from Juniper Research that predicts voice commerce will grow from $22 billion in 2020 to more than $164 billion in 2025. Juniper Research has found consumers will interact with voice assistants on more than 8.4 billion devices by 2024, compared to the 4.2 billion devices expected to be in use by year-end 2020.

Big brands have spared no expense to stake their claims in this AI-driven voice commerce space, making sure customers can find them easily on smartphone or home speaker voice assistants. Now, Zammo is enabling small- and medium-sized businesses, like Diedrich Espresso, to carve out a piece of what Zammo CEO Alex Farr calls the “new frontier” by making it simple and inexpensive for anyone to build text and voice chatbots. “His vision is to democratize voice,” says Stacey Kyler, Head of Customer Success at Zammo, referring to Farr. As the former owner of a photography business, Kyler is passionate about giving small businesses access to the same opportunities that bigger companies have.

Bots in a day

Before Zammo, building conversational AI solutions from scratch had been time consuming and expensive. Large companies would often hire a team of engineers and developers for months, at costs exceeding six figures. Each voice platform would have its own requirements and data models, and training a bot required specialized tech skills. Securing a voice domain was another obstacle.

With the Zammo AI platform, which uses Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, those challenges go by the wayside, enabling non-technical users to create branded, cross-platform voice apps in as little as a day. From an intuitive, web-based portal, an organization enters its basic details, privacy policy, and FAQ link. Zammo ingests this information and turns it into a bot that responds to voice inquiries on popular channels like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant or via text, through chat platforms like website chatbots, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, interactive voice response, and short message service/text messaging. From there, businesses can go as deep into conversational AI as they desire, and at their own pace.

Voice tech for any organization

Zammo equips companies, organizations, and government agencies to go transactional with prebuilt conversation modules for common use cases. Businesses can also use Zammo to connect to existing application programming interfaces and back-end systems to fully maximize their conversational AI presence. As part of its commitment to customer success, Zammo offers customers of all sizes training on how to build their own multi-turn conversations and conversation modules.

“I'll never forget the first time we got a notification in the morning that a business had signed up, and then a few hours later, I got the notification that it had submitted a voice app for publication,” Kyler says. “From start to finish, I had zero interaction with the customer. It was amazing. That’s when I knew we had created a platform that any organization could utilize.”

Another attribute: Zammo’s proprietary system helps users ensure they get the same voice domain name across platforms. “Once a name is taken, it’s gone,” Kyler explains. “This is particularly tricky for small businesses, where many companies share similar or even identical names.” Right now, Zammo has the only system that can check voice domain name availability across all platforms before the voice app is built, instead of waiting until it’s finished to check availability.

From coffee to COVID-19

Diedrich Espresso was one of many early Zammo success stories across a diverse range of use cases. Another example: Washington’s Snohomish County Government faced a deluge of public inquiries when the first COVID-19 case was identified there. To create a force multiplier for its overwhelmed staff, the county partnered with Microsoft and Zammo to implement a chatbot in just 48 hours. The service provides economic development and recovery information, answering thousands of inquiries around the clock in multiple languages.

In the early days of COVID-19, King County—home to Seattle—built a COVID-19 chatbot in a week, providing critical health information and answers to the public. Using the bot to triage requests, the system answered approximately 10,000 questions a month and freed the COVID-19 call center nursing staff to respond one-on-one to people with symptoms.

Empowering customers

Zammo is one of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) that develop software as a service (SaaS) products that run on Azure. Microsoft is working to grow its ISV relationships, making not only its tools and platforms available to these technology partners but its people, too. In addition to having access to the Microsoft open-source code, Kyler says it’s the ongoing human relationship with Microsoft employees that enables Zammo to empower customers. “We really love how Microsoft makes the engineers and the project managers available so, if there are questions, our engineers can go directly to those people and get answers,” she says.

The collaboration resulted in a 60-minute workshop in September 2020 for Microsoft partners to learn how to support clients in using Zammo AI to secure their online presence and engage customers through conversational voice. Today, Microsoft Store experts provide virtual Zammo voice app and chatbot training for small and medium businesses to develop their own branded, multi-channel conversational AI presence.

Using the capabilities of Azure is what makes Zammo’s solution possible, from instant support in more than 40 languages to seamlessly working with other Microsoft products. For example, King County created its chatbot to work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and its CRM to enhance conversations and allow non-technical staff to make timely updates.

Built-in data analysis capabilities allow rapid feedback and fine tuning. The King County team reviewed user engagement data to add new content that reduced unanswered questions by 85 percent. In Snohomish County, a review of user insight data showed that 44 percent of people had accessed the system via voice—even though the system’s voice capabilities had never been publicized.

Overcoming reluctance

Kyler points to a small contractor in Colorado who was reluctant—amidst the uncertainty of COVID-19— to hire someone new to handle a growing number of inquiries. As an interim step, he used Zammo to set up conversational AI as both a voice bot and chatbot. The contractor’s dashboard portal showed it was answering 400 to 500 inquiries a month. “From a small business perspective, that’s a lot of time saved,” Kyler says.

Most of all, Kyler loves seeing the sense of empowerment from small business owners when they realize they have access to an important tool that had initially seemed out of reach. “We get a lot of customers saying, ‘It’s this easy?’” After operating for less than a year, Zammo now has a few hundred customers. With the niche Zammo has carved out, expect a lot more to be joining the voice revolution soon.