Talla Company Blog

Talla, a Boston-based AI-powered customer service platform, announced today that Frank Speiser is joining the company as CEO. Speiser joins from his previously successful role as Co-Founder of SocialFlow, the world's largest machine-learning enabled content distribution software and has decades of experience building complex enterprise-class products.

A big source of business for us at Talla is failed chatbot projects. Building chatbots for customer support is hard because most of them are scripted. You have to go in and do some regular expression matching and then label language intents, and then map those to a workflow. It's a lot of work to create an interaction, and then the bot doesn't really learn much once it is deployed. As the world changes and new support issues arise, you have to go do a bunch of work to add those new issues.

If you are looking for automation and AI related to ServiceCloud, Salesforce does offer Einstein. However, it's a very different tool from Talla, so this short guide will help you understand those differences and design a workflow that can take advantage of the best parts of both offerings.

The most popular platform that Talla customers use for ticketing is Salesforce ServiceCloud. The increasing demand from customers for a fast and accurate support experience means that many companies that use Salesforce CRM have moved to ServiceCloud to consolidate customer information for a better customer experience.

The frustrating thing about reading AI news is that it covers a lot of the stuff that doesn't matter.  As someone who runs an AI company, invests in AI companies, and writes a newsletter about AI (and thus reads a lot of AI news), I thought it would be good to highlight 5 key ideas that I seem mostly missing from the frameworks people use to think about AI.  I do talk to a lot of smart people who know these things, in fact, some of the ideas came from AI. executives I've spoken to about AI. adoption, but most people, I believe, are missing these key pieces.

If you are looking to deploy a chatbot for support and have started to investigate the market for chatbot providers, you've probably been left with your head spinning trying to understand how they are different. Chatbot companies have different ways for building bots (how much is it out of the box ready, vs designed by you?) and different places they can deploy (website, facebook, slack, etc). This post is going to look quickly at the AI, or, in some cases lack of AI, that these bots have. In general you can divide them into one of 3 camps.

I'm a graduate of the University of Kentucky, which, if you aren't aware, is the winning-est college basketball team of all time. Basketball is a religion at U.K. And since there are no professional sports teams in Kentucky, college basketball is everything. So my favorite time of year has always been the first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament. On those days, games start at noon and, depending on the schedule and how many go to overtime, usually go on for 10-12 hours.

We are constantly working on two things at Talla: 1) Automating away ever more Service and Support tasks, and 2) Working everywhere that you work. In order to fulfill both of these pieces of the Talla vision, we have to continue to integrate with more tools. Today we are excited to announce integrations with HubSpot, Zendesk, and Jira.

This week I'm excited to announce that we are launching 3 new Talla products.  Well, technically 2 new products and one major upgrade, but the latter also feels new with all the improvement.  Earlier this year we were focused on "customer facing teams," and while we still have customers in Sales and Success, it is clear that the biggest interest in AI automation comes from Customer Service and Support teams.  With that in mind we've revamped the Talla Platform into three parts that can be used separately or together, and map more directly to key Service and Support workflows.  The three new products are:  a knowledge base for support teams, a rep assist tool, and a customer facing self service automation tool.  More details will come in future posts, but for now here are the highlights.