How Melbourne startup Phonely got into Y Combinator, and why it thinks voice is the next AI frontier
The virtual receptionist's co-founders will fly to California later this month having secured a spot at Y Combinator, just as Apple and Amazon look to AI to reboot their voice assistants.
Last week, Apple announced it would revamp its voice assistant Siri with generative AI technology. It followed the unveiling of Amazon’s own “north star for Alexa” last year, as the e-commerce giant previewed a new large language model to help deliver an enhanced smart speaker. And one of the world’s most prominent tech investors Andreessen Horowitz has just released a thesis on why it’s time AI reinvented the phone call.
It looks like voice might be the next frontier for the investment hotbed of generative AI, and an Aussie startup looks to have some of the biggest buzz, landing a spot in the coveted Y Combinator.
Melbourne-based Phonely AI is an AI receptionist that can hold a two-way phone call that sounds and feels like you’re speaking to a human. Having only launched in February, co-founders Will Bodewes and Nisal Ranasinghe will fly to California later this month to begin Silicon Valley’s most prestigious accelerator program.
“There's a lot of investor interest around voice being one of the better use cases for language models,” Phonely’s CEO Bodewes told Capital Brief. “I think that Y Combinator and a lot of people in the investor world see that.”
