French startup Rounded is betting big on AI voice agents becoming the default way customers interact with companies. Instead of building ready-to-use AI voice agents, the company has developed an orchestration platform that allows businesses to create their own voice agents tailored to their specific needs.

Rounded's journey began with a web3 product, but the team soon shifted its focus to AI voice agents in June 2023. Initially, they thought they could simply integrate ChatGPT with a transcriber and synthesizer to create a valuable product. However, they soon realized that the market wasn't ready for voice agents, prompting them to create a product and package everything to create a first agent, dubbed Donna.

Donna, an AI voice agent for anesthetists, was chosen as the pilot market due to the high volume of straightforward calls anesthesia secretaries handle. In France, patients must discuss their medical history with anesthetists before surgery, making it an ideal use case for an AI voice agent. Rounded convinced 15 private hospitals to let Donna answer calls, resulting in hundreds of thousands of conversations handled so far.

Initially, Rounded struggled with latency issues, but they have since improved the product to achieve latency of less than 700 milliseconds. This significant improvement has enabled the company to broaden its scope with an orchestration product that other companies can use to build their own voice agents.

The orchestration platform allows businesses to pick and choose from various off-the-shelf AI models, including speech-to-text, language models, and text-to-speech engines. For instance, a company could use Azure for transcription, GPT-4o mini as the language model, and ElevenLabs as the speech-to-text engine. The platform then helps define the instruction trees and prompts that make the language model work for the specific use case.

Rounded's co-founder, Aymeric Vaudelin, emphasized the importance of finding the right prompting, parameters, and variables in the prompt to implement a successful agent. The company's pitch is that it will enable everyone to create great prompts or great agents, and its product will support them in this iteration process to create super-reliable agents.

Rounded has raised €600,000 (around $620,000) from UC Berkeley's deeptech accelerator SkyDeck and several business angels. Given the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence, it's likely the startup will raise more funding in the coming months.

The implications of Rounded's orchestration platform are significant, as it has the potential to democratize access to AI voice agents across various industries. By providing a customizable platform, Rounded is empowering companies to create voice agents that cater to their unique needs, paving the way for a future where AI voice agents become the norm in customer interactions.

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, Rounded's innovative approach is likely to have a lasting impact on the industry. With its platform, the company is poised to play a key role in shaping the future of customer interactions, and its success could have far-reaching consequences for businesses and consumers alike.