Keyvan Mohajer, cofounder and CEO, SoundHound
Keyvan Mohajer launched the voice-recognition platform SoundHound, then called Melodis, in a Stanford dorm room in 2005.
The doctoral student knew “conversations with robots” were the future of customer service. But he couldn’t get any investors to fund technology that would take a decade or more to perfect.
“In those days, they wanted faster outcomes,” Mohajer told Insider.
So the CEO and his cofounders “went back to the dorm room” and came up with an idea that would change the trajectory of the business.
“We can build a humming engine so you can hear a song and we can tell you what it is,” he said.
SoundHound was born. For the next several years, the music-recognition app helped fund “stealth” voice AI research at the firm.
“We knew that voice is going to be everywhere and conversational AI is going to be a future,” he said.
After years of research, SoundHound’s voice AI is changing how thousands of consumers order food at hundreds of restaurants across the US, including White Castle. The company’s voice AI bots take phone and drive-thru orders.
White Castle is rolling out SoundHound’s voice bots to 100 drive-thru locations. Other restaurants and chains adopting SoundHound’s bots include Beef O’Brady’s and Kneaders bakeries.
SoundHound said its tech is entirely automated and doesn’t require human interaction. The bots are fast and tackle order-taking tasks that “restaurant staff don’t want to do,” Mohajer said.
Oracle, Toast, Square, and ChowNow, online ordering and point-of-sale tech companies, offer SoundHound’s voice AI as an option for their restaurant clients.
Rivals in the space include Presto, ConverseNow, and OpenCity, whose voice AI bots are used by Hardee’s, Panera Bread, Domino’s, and Wingstop. Mohajer says he likes the competition. It proves the tech has gone from stealth to mainstream adoption.
“This is the year that it’s finally happening,” he said.
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