Schaumburg firm DialMind honing skills of AI phone attendants for other service companies

A Schaumburg-based company is working rapidly on the improvement of AI phone attendants for other firms, beginning with the type of senior home care agencies that emphasize the need to get it right.

Patrick Panayotov, chief growth officer of DialMind, sees a perfect fit for AI in a task no one really dreams of doing and for which less sophisticated automation leaves customers frustrated.

“Part of the drive to create this business came from personally calling a major clothing brand with a gift card issue, and being shocked they still had the ‘click 1 for … click 2 for …’ as of late last year,” he said.

But the company’s humanlike AI phone attendants, who commonly go by names like Karen and James, are designed to be warm, helpful, empathetic and capable of quickly thinking up follow-up questions without intending to deceive. If asked by callers whether they’re AI, they will unhesitatingly say so.

Examples of different attendant voices and their ability to respond and adapt to both routine and off-topic inquiries can be heard at youtube.com/@DialMind.

“It can’t be a replacement for people, but it has to be close,” Panayotov said. “The peace of mind our clients are looking for is that it has to be accurate.”

The service even directs DialMind’s own incoming calls.

“If I’m not going to use it, I’m not going to sell it,” Panayotov added.

He described the creation process as combining the most sophisticated technologies available and then training the system like an intelligent child.

“With tools such as ChatGPT for complex language understanding and ElevenLabs for the voice, the speed at which we can create today is astounding,” Panayotov said. “Our innovation lies in the ability to connect these complex tools together and build them into an out-of-the-box solution for businesses today.”

Even in recent weeks, the AI attendants have acquired memory to remember information about a caller from one call to the next and to converse more fluently in Spanish. One client in Miami even requested a voice with more of a Spanish-speaking inflection in English.

DialMind doesn’t hold any patents, however.

“With the speed AI is developing at, it is still early to know what will have a long-term impact,” Panayotov said. “Our focus is on using the tools available to make an immediate impact on local business owners.”

He said many of those owners joke that while they’re not AI experts themselves, they’re now running AI-powered businesses.

Such clients already come from near and far, but the one most pushing DialMind to innovate is Matt McCleary, co-owner of the Assisting Hands Home Care location in Mansfield, Texas. He’s asking for creation of an “Elderly Call Companion” that will use the same technology to actively reach out to his own clients to inquire how they are.

Even with the service that already exists, he said clients’ moods have changed as a result of interacting with the attendants.

“Patrick was very intrigued by the outbound Elderly Call Companion,” McCleary said. “We’re first to the market on this. I have a family friend that really needs the companionship. I don’t want to be deceptive. Especially with the clientele that we serve, they want to have that connection. Every year, AI is going to get better and better.”

Panayotov said the Elderly Call Companion project now is moving to its second stage with the building out of a separate system.

McCleary said the existing phone attendant system has been as helpful to the business as his clients.

About 20% of the company’s calls are just caregivers clocking in and out, something the attendant can easily handle. Other callers are connected with a human being when they specifically ask or when their question or concern is determined to require it.

“When a call comes through to me, it’s more appropriate,” McCleary said.

While Panayotov also is a partner in the Schaumburg-based digital marketing firm Proceed Innovative LLC, DialMind is a separate company established with his cousins.

Martin Panayotov is CEO of DialMind and Robert Panayotov is chief technology officer.