Sabio Group Acquires Fonetic

Sabio Group has acquired Fonetic, a Spanish provider of cloud-enabled AI voicebots, chatbots and customer behaviour analytics solutions.

The announcement strengthens Sabio’s AI and Automation solutions offering, enabling the company’s goal of supporting customers with its own truly innovative range of CX solutions to complement its broad multi-vendor product portfolio.

Since its formation in 2006, Fonetic has established itself as a specialist in the provision of voice recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence-powered voicebot and chatbot solutions.

Fonetic solutions help organizations to digitally transform their CX operations. The company currently manages, processes and monitors over 200 million interactions per year for major clients, including Generali, Axa, Banco Santander, Endesa, Linea Directa, Mapfre, Multiasistencia and Vodafone.

“We’re now at the stage where it’s reasonable to expect that almost every customer interaction will soon be fronted by AI in some shape or form, and that AI-enabled capabilities are poised to transform customer experience,” explained Sabio’s CEO Jonathan Gale.

“With its proven voicebot, chatbot, customer behaviour analytics and visualization capabilities, Fonetic directly addresses this challenge. The company not only brings an incredibly talented team but valuable expertise in CX digital transactions that will be an important addition to Sabio’s own IP portfolio.”

“At Fonetic we can demonstrate how our voicebots and chatbots perform at scale. This helps our clients to digitally transform their customer engagement by increasing CX efficiencies while also securing significant increases in customer satisfaction,” added Juan Manuel Soto, Fonetic’s CEO and Founder.

“As part of the Sabio Group we can bring our voicebot and chatbot offering to a much broader market, especially as AI and automation adoption within the CX sector is set to accelerate exponentially.”

Fonetic works closely with Generali Spain’s Digital Transformation team, and designed and developed the multichannel bot for Generali in Spain.

Commenting on Sabio Group’s acquisition of Fonetic, Generali Spain’s Head of Business Transformation and Control, Enrique Lorente, said: “Fonetic’s bot expertise and design skills are a key factor behind the success of our cognitive bot – by providing a conversational assistant to our distributors and customers, offering automatic claim management, one of Generali’s key and highly volume processes, and allowing them to use the channel of their choice, in an easy and natural way. We look forward to being part of their continued success.”

Based in Madrid, Fonetic employs 49 people, 38 of whom are developers and linguists.

Fonetic voicebots and chatbots can be deployed using either the company’s own technology or integrated with third-party NLP assets to get the most out of tools such as Microsoft Bot Framework & Luis, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, Nuance’s Nina, Sabio’s own solution flexAnswer, Genesys or home assistants like Alexa and Google Home.