Israeli startup Touchless.ai announced the deployment of its intuitive voice management solution that turns any interactive kiosk into a touch-free easy-to-use interface. The Israeli platform looks to provide a solution for commercial vendors to combat loud noise and user confusion, while streamlining service, especially for places that serve food and drinks.
Solving what previously seemed unsolvable
Touchless.ai eliminates any physical interaction with the ordering screen, enabling with numbered options on the screen that are triggered by voice-command. Use additional specific voice commands to conduct tasks such as ordering specific dishes at a restaurant. Touchless.ai’s solution eliminates interference from noises, thus enabling kiosks to reliably respond to voice commands. As a result, the solution is extremely easy to use, reliable, and integrates with a customer’s needs with ease and at no extra cost.
Roy Baharav, co-creator of Touchless.ai, stated: “Touchless.ai enables businesses to instantly upgrade their digital kiosks to a natural, seamless voice experience that their customers will love. Now more than ever, we see it as our mission to give today’s businesses the touchless technology needed to keep the kiosk experience safe and empower businesses to continue thriving.’’
Touchless.ai’s interface needs no trigger word, and works from the moment users start talking, for a seamless and natural user experience. It operates without identifying the user’s voice or face, or storing any personal data, eliminating all privacy concerns. It leverages the digital kiosk’s existing interface, so users instantly understand how to navigate using their voice. It can be installed easily with the company’s snippet or Chrome extension, for developer-free, zero-code implementation.
Touchless.ai has already started trials in the U.S. and Europe with some known chains. The proprietary technology enables consumers to receive service at sites such as restaurants, points of sale, airports, medical centers, theme parks and other public spaces by talking to the digital kiosks without the need to touch screens. Currently, the software has been adapted into English, Japanese, and Hebrew, but can easily be modified to operate in any language. Moreover, the Israeli startup’s solution is adaptable to all web-based apps used at kiosks and plans in the future to accommodate iOS and Android operating systems. On the tech side, Touchless.ai is collaborating with Intel and leading kiosk supplier Pyramid.
"We solved the problems of voice experience in commercial environments with a system that really works, and that's the big news," continued Baharav. "Until now, voice interfaces in commercial environments did not work for three reasons: the tasks were too complex for the existing technologies; the voice recognition technologies were not accurate enough in a noisy environment with complex interactions; and the setup for existing solutions could run into tens of thousands of dollars to develop a new voice application and take several months."
The public concern over interaction with touchscreens outside the home has been accentuated due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to research by Capgemini, 77% of consumers would rather use touchless technologies following the rise in personal hygiene, which has taken center stage to our daily routine over the last few months. Customers intend to bypass the need to interact with humans or potentially contaminated surfaces, and they expect this behavior to persist even after Covid-19 is behind us.
Touchless.ai was created in 2020 by Hi Auto, which invented the world's first audio-visual commercial solution for speaker separation and speech enhancement in vehicles. Hi Auto was founded in 2019 by CEO Roy Baharav, CTO Eyal Shapira and the acting chairman Zohar Zisapel. Baharav returned recently to Israel after living 12 years in the West Coast of the U.S., where he served in various product management positions at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and as the CEO of SeamBI that he founded in 2006.
Baharav continues to explain that “we found a solution for all these problems and came up with the first speech-enabled system for interactive kiosks that can work accurately in multi-speaker commercial settings. Another key problem is that people speak in a non-structured way. Therefore, voice interfaces fail, and people don't like using them in a commercial environment where you need to carry out a complex order. This is why menus work. Menu users understand what is offered and can say exactly what they want. It is easy, and this is why we use menus at Tocuhless.ai."
