Showpad on Wednesday will announce an acquisition that will bring artificial intelligence-based voice recording and transcription analysis to its customer base of sales professionals as a way of boosting their productivity and effectiveness.

The Chicago-based firm, whose software offers a range of sales enablement capabilities to B2B firms, said it has purchased Voicefox, a two-year old startup founded  in London, U.K. Voicefox was designed to integrate with existing video conference solutions such as Gotomeeting, Zoom or Google Hangout) to record, transcribe and analyze business conversations.

Showpad — which has been building out a platform where sales rep can do screen sharing, social selling and personalized content portals — said it will apply the Voicefox technology as a means for coaching sales reps and improving their chances of closing a deal. 

Voicefox uses a combination of voice and video AI to provide an accurate transcription, identify speakers and understand what content is being presented in a meeting, explained Louis Jonckheere, Showpad’s chief product officer. This includes natural language processing (NLP) which surfaces key insights such as objections and important questions.

“It gives sales managers the ability to understand and validate what’s happening in the field,” Jonckheere told B2B News Network. “It provides the perfect opportunity to point out areas for improvement for future interactions and better customer engagement.”

A sales manager can access a conversation an employee had with a prospective customer, for example, and quickly scan voice transcriptions for keywords, correct messaging and proper sales language that should be delivered during a sales pitch, Jonckheere said.

Jonckheere said customers can expect more specifics around how Voicefox’s capabilities will be integrated into its platform early next year. “Right now we can say that these new capabilities will be used to strengthen our content, coaching and engagement capabilities,” he said.

Beyond the Voicefox acquistion, Showpad also introduced additional integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) products such as Microsoft Dynamics and SAP’s C4C, as well as integrations with sales engagement programs such as SalesLoft and Outreach. Perosnalized landing pages, meanwhile, will allow sales pros to tailor what they send to prospective buyers based on topic, persona and more.

“(We want) to provide a seamless workflow that increases efficiency while reducing administrative burden,” he said.

In August, Showpad turned to another much-discussed technology, augmented reality (AR), when it introduced a way for sales people to offer a more immersive e-commerce experience.

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