NJ-Based Companies Onvego and Phone.com Partner to Develop AI-Based “Receptionist” for Small Businesses
Two New Jersey companies, Onvego (Livingston) and Phone.com (Newark), recently collaborated on an AI solution that extends the capabilities of traditional answering services, creating an “AI receptionist” that can handle many tasks for small businesses.
The “Smart Receptionist” (Onvego’s name) and “AI-Connect” (Phone.com’s name) leverage state-of-the-art proprietary intellectual property that supports automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). It encompasses natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TTS) and large language model (LLM) technologies without exposing any of the complexity to customers or callers. The software also gathers business intelligence to allow small businesses to improve their operations and profits.
NJTechWeekly.com spoke to Phone.com cofounder and CEO, Ari Rabban, and to Onvego’s Gonen Ziv, chief revenue officer, about their businesses and how their new AI product could be a breakthrough for them and for their customers. They also discussed the New Jersey tech ecosystem, which brought them together.
Rabban started Phone.com in New Jersey 15 years ago, with the help of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) pioneer Alon Cohen, who is now the company’s CTO. Rabban has been an integral part of the New Jersey tech community since he cofounded Phone.com, which later received funding from ff Venture Capital (New York), as well as help from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). He said that he met Ziv through the New Jersey tech community, and found that their two companies had similar objectives.
Onvego, which has also been funded by ff Venture Capital, has a research and development center in Israel, and Rabban is originally from Israel, so the two executives had much in common. “We connected and we designed this product specifically with Onvego,” said Rabban. “They’re marketing it and promoting it as well.”
Ziv said that working with Cohen was like having all the resources of a museum at his disposal. “He was the guy who invented VoIP!” Ziv said. Asked what engineering design elements they collaborated on, Ziv replied, “How to deal with cloud switches and the telephony side. They very quickly helped us understand the space, how to build the system, so that when we deployed, we were integrated into the switch, into the cloud.” The Phone.com team also helped Onvego understand what was valuable for Phone.com’s 50,000 customers. For example, the customers needed the ability to block Spam. “Slowly, but surely, they helped us build the layers of the product to the point that we got it today,” Ziv said.
Ziv has been living in New Jersey for 35 years, having moved here from Israel. He joined Onvego about four years ago. Ziv said that he convinced Onvego to set up its U.S. headquarters in New Jersey because of the “proximity to New York City without having all the expenses of New York City.” Also, the excellent education system in New Jersey “provides advantages to potential employees who have kids in schools.” Referring to the NJEDA and Choose New Jersey, he added, “I know that you can find a lot of support here in New Jersey.”
Ziv added that, besides Phone.com, he is working with Princeton-based VoiceNEXT. Onvego is also recruiting more New Jersey employees and is looking for additional space, probably in Newark.
Ziv reviewed some of Onvego’s history. Originally focused on applying voice to IT, Onvego has been involved in AI for years, Ziv noted. For example, it developed a drone that can work with voice commands for the military and an elevator that responds to voice commands and knows what companies are on what floors. It wasn’t much of a leap for Onvego to incorporate unified communications into their products, he said.
“The whole idea is, how can you bring the AI revolution to a small business that doesn’t have the knowledge, the resources, the money to develop something? You know, some of the banks have spent millions and millions of dollars, so when you call the bank, you can talk to the system in natural language. Small businesses with just a few people don’t have those types of resources.”
According to Amber Bigler Newman, director of marketing for Phone.com, her company has grown to the point where it is looking for additional ways “to bring value to our customers, which are tiny, small businesses for the most part. Of course, we can support larger customers, but we’re passionate about bringing the value of all of the cloud communications capabilities to tiny businesses.”
When Phone.com thought about using AI to add features to its phone-answering services, it had to deal with the question, Are phone calls really relevant anymore?
“What we found is that most consumers still prefer to talk to businesses on the phone. Sixty percent of them choose calling versus all the other web forms and chat and other ways that you can talk to a business. And what’s even more important is that small businesses find that these interactions over the phone are far more lucrative than any other way that they can communicate with their customers, up to 10 to 15 percent more lucrative. On the other hand, small businesses have a hard time answering all of their calls, and most of them say that they can’t get to every call. Live answering is a great solution if you can afford it. We are big fans of it, but it’s often cost prohibitive, particularly for very small businesses.”
This is where AI-Connect comes in, Newman said. Powered by Onvego, “it understands what the caller’s intent is, and helps our customers by either allowing their callers to reach a person that they’re looking to reach or schedule an appointment. And it even enables directed call routing, where you can have a warm transfer. So, for example, if I call and I have to speak to Ari, the AI will ask me my name, and I’ll tell it I’m Amber, and it will call Ari and say, ‘Hey, Ari, Amber is on the phone. Do you want to talk to her?’ And he can say yes and take the call; or he can say no, and then it will come back to the AI solution and ask me if I want to leave a voicemail or an email message for Ari. So, he then has control over who he’s speaking with, and if he doesn’t pick up at all, then I can leave my message. But as a caller, I know that I’m being connected with the person that I’m trying to reach.” Phone.com is offering AI-Connect as an add- on for $19.99 per month to its current customers.
Ziv noted that one advantage of the system is that it provides business intelligence analytics to very small companies to improve their operations and profits. “When that caller calls in — say, to a car dealership — and asks questions like, ‘Do you do financing?’ or ‘Do you have Toyota Corollas?’ the system is actually tracking all that specific information, and the business can see what people are interested in, what they’re asking, what the trends are. For example, if a lot of people are asking, ‘Are you open at 7 a.m.?’ maybe they will open at 7 a.m. to better service their customers. That’s information small businesses don’t have now.”
Newly added capabilities include the ability of callers to ask a question in natural language about a business such as: What are your hours? How do I find you? What’s your return policy? “ and get a response. The AI software can answer callers’ questions, which for a lot of our customers would offload a lot of the calls that they have. After getting the answer, if the caller wants to schedule an appointment or talk to somebody, they can also do that. It’s become a key part of our offering,” Ziv concluded.
