CHENNAI, India — India’s Uniphore, an AI startup that deals with enterprises’ customer service calls, won the Frost & Sullivan Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award in Conversational Automation for 2021.

Frost & Sullivan, a research and consulting firm, said the award was for Uniphore’s innovative approach towards customer needs in the development and support it provides in its conversational service automation platform using Artificial Intelligence.

The award is the result of an independent, non-sponsored evaluation by Frost & Sullivan’s analyst team.

Uniphore is a conversational service automation platform, which allows customer service agents of enterprises to automate tasks, and provides features like virtual assistants and voice biometrics.

“Because of the pandemic, enterprise automation has really accelerated the transformation of enterprise conversations, with a specific focus on customer experience,” said Umesh Sachdev, chief executive officer and co-founder of Uniphore.

“To solve some major challenges and eliminate customer frustration across the board, we know that AI-driven conversational automation is the key.”

“Frost & Sullivan is a leading analyst firm that has expertise and experience in this space to truly understand what businesses need to succeed,” Sachdev said.

“It is an honor to be recognized by them for our innovative solutions and hypergrowth, and we look forward to continuing to change customer service for the better.”

“By leveraging facial emotion recognition and sentiment analysis, Uniphore will be able to enhance video engagements that have become so prevalent in the COVID and WFH-era,” according to the statement released by the company.

Uniphore acquired Emotion Research Labs in Jan this year to include emotion AI for its products. Emotion Research Lab is a software developer that uses AI and machine learning to identify emotion and engagement levels in real-time.

The company had said the acquisition would expand Uniphore’s global footprint and European-based presence. Uniphore plans to expand into additional European countries in Fiscal Year 2022.

In March, Uniphore raised $40 million as part of its Series D funding round, which U.S.-based investment firm Sorenson Capital Partners led.

“Uniphore has been at the forefront of conversational automation for years and continues to impress,” Nancy Jamison, Industry Director, Information & Communications Technologies at Frost & Sullivan, said.

“Following a challenging year across the board for businesses, customer service, and employee experience, Uniphore has set a stake in the ground with its vision for conversational process automation by honing in on the ways that humans communicate and building solutions to improve that communication.”

(With inputs from ANI)

(Edited by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan and Praveen Pramod Tewari)