Voicebox Wants You to Whisper Customer Feedback to Your Phone. That’s the idea behind a wave of voice startups betting that talking is faster than typing, and faster than waiting on hold.
Voice software is everywhere right now. Wispr turns spoken words into fast, accurate text. Granola offers ears that never stop listening during meetings. Now Voicebox wants to apply that same approach to customer complaints.
The Idea Behind Voicebox
Karan Gupta, CEO of Voicebox, says the technology has finally caught up. “That voice could now be accurate. It could be fast,” Gupta says, describing a change in what voice software can do.
Gupta’s last startup, Alice, also relied on voice, and was built for secure written records of speech. Voicebox takes a similar base and points it at something simpler: the customer complaint.
Using it works like this. Shoppers scan a QR code or tap an NFC device posted in a store, then say whatever they want. The words are turned into text and sent to a company dashboard, along with an analysis of tone. Companies can follow up by email if needed. Voicebox has also partnered with airports, letting travelers speak up about their experience there, including how well the gate signs point the way.
Beyond the Store Counter
Gupta wants Voicebox used for more than ordinary business feedback. Earlier this year, Lena Dunham held an event in San Francisco for her book Famesick and put a Voicebox QR code on the screen. People at the event left personal messages, saying how much they connected with her medical journey. Gupta points to that moment as proof people want to talk about things that matter to them, not just complain about bad service.
That thinking led to Voicebox’s newest feature: a public listing of feedback tied to businesses. It lets feedback come in from anywhere, and in future versions, users will be able to see what others have said publicly about a given business through the listing.
Consider a few ways the listing could get used:
- Leaving a quick opinion about a store visit on the way out the door.
- Giving future patients advice on where to park at a hospital.
- Looking up a business by name to read what other people have said about it, much like reading reviews on Google Maps.
The listing pushes Voicebox away from being only a means for businesses to gather complaints and toward something closer to a place built from many voices, where people share what they think.
A Natural Next Step
None of this requires people to give up typing entirely. It simply relies on the idea that speaking for a few seconds takes less effort than writing an email, or sitting on hold waiting for a person to answer.
That fits with a wider change already happening in voice software, where turning speech into text has become accurate enough that typing on a phone screen can start to feel less convenient by comparison.
Whether that change reaches all the way to public reviews and casual comments about hospital parking is not yet clear. But Voicebox is betting it will.
After talking with Gupta, there was one obvious next step: opening the Voicebox listing and looking up Voicebox itself. It seemed only fair to leave some feedback out loud. A couple sitting close by at the airport caused a small delay, and a small awkwardness of speaking complaints into a phone while they could still hear every word.
Source: wired.com
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