These two founders left Goldman and Meta to build voice AI for markets everyone else overlooked
The Unseen Frontier of Voice AI: How AethexAI is Revolutionizing Customer Support in Emerging Markets
In the world of voice AI, the narrative often revolves around the successes of companies like ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Sierra, and Cognigy, which have made significant strides in automating customer support and service. However, the reality is that these companies were built with Western markets in mind, leaving a significant gap in the market for emerging economies. Enter AethexAI, a startup founded by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, who left their respective roles at Goldman Sachs and Meta to bridge this gap.
The Africa and Middle East Market: A Unique Challenge
The Africa and Middle East market presents a unique set of challenges for voice AI companies. Enterprises in these regions process roughly three times the call volume of their Western counterparts, with voice being the dominant channel for customer interaction. However, the incumbent systems were built for Western markets, characterized by high-end GPU infrastructure, standard English, and European speech environments. This creates real gaps when enterprises need systems that handle dialects, code-switching, and informal speech patterns, and that work within their existing telephony infrastructure and price points.
AethexAI's Solution: Small Models, Big Impact
AethexAI's founders recognized the need for a tailored solution that could handle the localized dialects of English, French, and Arabic spoken across their target markets. Rather than using existing orchestration tools like Vapi and LiveKit, they built their own small model and orchestration layer from scratch. This decision was driven by the particular demands of operating in the region, where latency and jitter were found to be outrageous. By using small models, AethexAI was able to cut latency at every step, resulting in a more accurate and efficient solution.
Training and Data Collection: A Cost-Effective Approach
To train their models, AethexAI used anonymized recordings from a call center partner and shipped hard drives to radio stations across Africa to collect more audio data. To keep costs down, they built a contributor network of university students to annotate data and pronounce local names. This approach allowed AethexAI to handle more than 17,000 calls per day, making it a cost-effective solution for emerging markets.
Business Model and Partnerships
AethexAI is open to working across all industries, but at the moment, a big part of its use cases involves calls for debt collection, customer activation, or KYC – Know Your Customer verification, the standard identity-checking process used by banks and telecoms. The company is hiring forward-deployed engineers on a contract basis to serve local markets and building channel partnerships with telecoms providers to handle telephony for voice AI calls. Plug-and-play solutions simply won't work here, and AethexAI is taking care to walk clients who are new to voice AI through the process, offering onsite demos and workshops to help them identify the best use cases for automation.
The Future of Voice AI in Emerging Markets
The success of AethexAI highlights the need for voice AI companies to adapt to the unique challenges of emerging markets. By building tailored solutions that handle dialects, code-switching, and informal speech patterns, companies can unlock new opportunities in these regions. As the demand for voice AI continues to grow, it's clear that AethexAI is at the forefront of a revolution that will transform the way businesses interact with their customers in emerging markets.
Conclusion
The Africa and Middle East market presents a unique set of challenges for voice AI companies, but AethexAI is leading the charge in revolutionizing customer support in these regions. By building small models, cutting latency, and using cost-effective approaches to training and data collection, AethexAI is making it possible for businesses to automate customer support and service in emerging markets. As the demand for voice AI continues to grow, it's clear that AethexAI is at the forefront of a revolution that will transform the way businesses interact with their customers in emerging markets.
