The Melburnians behind one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI start-ups

Two University of Melbourne PhD researchers are taking their start-up to Silicon Valley, winning a place in the world’s largest start-up accelerator program for their artificial intelligence phone receptionist that can schedule appointments, and talk just like a human.

Will Bodewes and Nisal Ranasinghe are the entrepreneurs behind Phonely, an AI start-up that answers phone calls and is 70 per cent cheaper than a human employee. Their technology tracks, analyses and improves its responses over time.

Bodewes said Phonely was developed as a response to a real-world problem his father was facing.

“My dad, who ran a veterinary clinic, had this problem where he couldn’t hire any staff, and he was missing a lot of calls because he couldn’t hire a receptionist. It was costing him thousands of dollars in lost revenue. I knew AI was advanced enough now to be able to help,” Bodewes said.

Phonely co-founders Nisal Ranasinghe and Will Bodewes.

Bodewes tapped his friend and university colleague Ranasinghe to tackle the problem, using their research from the University of Melbourne to build technology they say can respond accurately to every phone call.

Start-up accelerator program Y Combinator.

“It’s not a simple problem,” Ranasinghe said. “Large language models have to be carefully trained and instructed to prevent speech errors and to interact with scheduling software. Additionally, when you’re dealing with voice applications, everything has to happen in less than a second.”

As Ranasinghe puts it, the result is a receptionist that never takes time off, answers in multiple languages, and can handle up to 1 million calls at once.

The pair now find themselves in the world’s largest start-up accelerator program, Y Combinator, which is where the likes of Airbnb, DoorDash, Reddit, Dropbox and Stripe got their start.

Phonely is one of the first 20 Australian start-ups to be selected for the three-month intensive Y Combinator program, and its co-founders will soon travel to California where they will receive a $US500,000 ($750,000) investment, as well as mentoring and connections.

Getting there wasn’t easy: the pair had to navigate a 3am Zoom interview with Y Combinator just hours after pitching their start-up onstage at a Startup Victoria AI event, where they won the people’s choice award.

“It was absolutely insane,” Bodewes said. “We had been working on Phonely for seven months, and we had just been trying and trying, and nothing was taking. In that week leading up, we had four different investors turn us down, and we were trying to figure out how we were going to be able to get this thing to work.

“You always hear stories of things like this happening, and those opportunities always seem to happen to other people. So, to be on the other end of that, after all the stress and anxiety that has gone into it, we have a chance of building exactly what we want to build, which is a really big company that has a big impact.”

Phonely’s launch comes at a time of heightened anxiety around the potential job losses that might follow in AI’s wake, particularly given its use can often be cheaper than employing humans to do the same job.

For Bodewes, he wants Phonely to be a net positive for humanity, rather than a net negative.

“It’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about,” he said. “We want to hopefully create situations where people can be in more fulfilling positions and doing better work.

“Right now, the state of artificial intelligence is it makes people a lot more efficient at what they’re doing. So for small businesses that want to provide great service to their customers, the people working in a receptionist job can now move into better positions that are more fulfilling for them. Our job is not to replace or eliminate a lot of these jobs, it’s just to allow people to be in better positions to work on more fun and challenging problems,” Bodewes said.

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