What is True Reply & History of True Reply
Absolutely, Keri. True Reply does one thing very well - we enable agencies and enterprises to launch a voice application in minutes instead of weeks or months. You can think of a voice app like a mobile app for your phone but for voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
We officially launched True Reply in June of last year but we began working on the project in 2017.
The main catalyst for starting True Reply was to help patients living with rare diseases better participate in healthcare studies via voice. We hit some major milestones early including being the first open-ended voice solution to be deployed in a national healthcare study as well as powering the first consumer research study in the emerging markets.
We learned a lot in those early late nights about what it takes to make voice technology accessible and actionable for today’s businesses.
We incorporated a year later and today we help enterprise and teams create, launch, and manage voice experiences as voice apps on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and beyond.
What businesses/markets does True Reply serve?
Today, we specifically focus on helping marketers and researchers leverage Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant for consumer engagement across industries. Our solution has powered voice apps across healthcare, human resources, insurance, real estate, and entertainment.
How does True Reply help businesses scale with voice technology?
From inception, we believed the key to making voice technology valuable was accessibility.
If we could break away from the silos of engineering and development and allow anyone to, regardless of their technical expertise, launch a voice experience within a few minutes, we knew we’d have something really special.
We help businesses scale by making it super easy for them to use Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant to create deep and meaningful relationships with their customers, patients, audience and fans. And today, with the pandemic, social distancing and lockdowns, the opportunity of using voice assistants as a vehicle to build engagement with consumers is incredible.
Our long term vision for True Reply is that, by making such a complex technology so easy and accessible, it can become the platform of choice for a business of any size to bringing great ideas to life on voice assistants.
Can you share with us any success stories of businesses that have seen their company grow and scale while also making their clients happy?
Absolutely, I’d actually like to share 3 great stories about how we’ve impacted the lives of our customers and their communities.
First, we have a strong relationship with the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation who were strong supporters of us very early on. They’re a non-profit out of New York City and they sponsor and conduct studies in CMT or Charcot-Marie-Tooth.
A rare and debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system.
Something they noticed was that, in all their studies, they rarely focused on the issue of pain within patients living with CMT. They created a focus study around pain and engaged patients using True Reply to power a voice-only experience.
About 200 patients were engaged. What they found, as a result of this study, changed the trajectory and focus of future studies because not only did they collect the response data but they also collected the full audio of the engagement.
See, the study was conducted via telephone where patients called a toll-free number and were able to engage the voice app that way instead of via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. This gave them the opportunity to gather both the quantitative data of patient responses as well as the qualitative data of patient audio recordings.
Those two elements together painted a very clear and visceral understanding of the amount of pain patients were managing with CMT. But it wasn’t just about the study data collection itself. The patients in the study overwhelmingly reported that the experience felt easy and more personal than the alternatives they’d participated in the past.
The second story, and these next two are much shorter, I promise.
The second story I’ll share is of a major recruiting firm, unfortunately I can’t share the name right now, but the important part was True Reply enabled them to save over 400 hours a month in recruitment time simply by incorporating an automated, voice-based screening process using Amazon Alexa and telephone.
With a minimal investment, they managed to save thousands a month and the implementation was very quick and very easy. They’re now looking into expanding their program across several regions and different recruitment touch points.
Finally, and this is more speaking to the power of voice technology as a whole than True Reply specifically. Early in 2018 I received a phone call from a man in the U.K. A few months back we had launched the first ever incentivized surveying program on Amazon Alexa, powered by True Reply. It’s called Voice Rewards and basically you sign-up and get paid for completing surveys using Alexa and your voice. It’s a great community that has been growing steadily since we launched it.
His brother was a quadriplegic and he had walked in on him participating in Voice Rewards via Amazon Alexa. It was the first time his brother was able to earn money on his own and it filled him with such joy and pride he felt compelled to reach out to me personally to share the impact we were having.
That’s not exactly a story about scale but it is a story that reflects how valuable this technology, powered by True Reply, can become and the potential impact we can empower.
We deeply believe that by making the most advanced voice technologies accessible and available easily to anyone, we can empower businesses and organizations to impact the lives of millions.
What makes True Reply unique? Why should the businesses in the areas you serve choose you and how do you stand out amongst your competitors?
Speed and accessibility of our platform. The fact that anyone can go to truereply.com right now and within 15 minutes create, test, and launch a fully customized, branded voice experience to over a billion devices worldwide is extremely powerful.
But that’s only one side of the coin. Once it’s launched you’re able to manage the whole thing, mold the experience to users in real-time and then you get all this data and insights via your dashboard on True Reply.
Our platform makes using voice assistants as part of your overall strategies for customer engagement a creative feat not a technical one and that is game changing.
Imagine how much further along the world would be when it comes to internet based technology and businesses, creatively speaking, if WordPress was available at the birth of the internet.