"""Language generation has seemingly monopolized the attention of those interested in NLP, but the most significant opportunity for developers interested in building NLP into their systems actually rests in language representation models like BERT,” said Gomez."

"Unlike OpenAI or Cohere, Hugging Face does not build its own NLP models."

"Based in Israel, AI21 has a two-pronged business model: it offers proprietary large language models via API to power customers’ applications (its current state-of-the-art model, named Jurassic-1, is roughly the same size as GPT-3), and it also builds and commercializes its own applications on top of those models. Its current application suite focuses on tools to augment reading and writing."

"Its stated mission is to “fundamentally redefine human-machine interaction” by enabling humans to “relay our thoughts and ideas to computers using the same natural, conversational language we use to communicate with people.”"

"The new entrant taking on Google most directly is You.com."

"Its product vision includes a horizontal layout, an emphasis on content summarization, and above all, a commitment to user data privacy."

"ZIR AI is a young startup building a new search platform for enterprise. Leveraging the latest transformer-based techniques, ZIR is seeking to develop search technology with true semantic comprehension (as opposed to keyword-based matching) and more sophisticated multilingual capabilities."

"Algolia offers an API that enables its customers—from tech companies like Slack to media businesses like the Financial Times—to embed search experiences in their websites and applications."

"One final enterprise search startup worth keeping an eye on is Hebbia, which is building an AI research platform to enable companies to extract insights from their private unstructured data."

"“Google has only indexed 4% of the world’s online data. We’re unleashing the other 96%.”"

"But thanks to recent breakthroughs in AI, opportunities now exist for startups to build search tools for data modalities beyond text"

"and no new modality represents a bigger opportunity than video."

"A whopping 80% of the data on the internet today is video"

"Yet remarkably, there is no effective way to search through all this video content—to find, say, a particular moment, concept or discussion."

"One exciting startup building next-generation video search capabilities is Twelve Labs, which announced its seed financing earlier this month."

"Twelve Labs fuses cutting-edge NLP and computer vision to enable precise semantic search within videos."

"“Multimodal AI” like this—that is, AI that ingests and synthesizes data from multiple informational modalities at once, like image and audio—will play a central role in AI’s future."

"Textio, LitLingo, and Writer are three newer entrants using next-generation language AI to build advanced Grammarly-like solutions for more targeted use cases."

"Trained on millions of writing samples, Textio’s AI can give users nuanced insights about their job postings and other hiring-related content"

"LitLingo, meanwhile, uses real-time NLP to monitor employees’ digital messages and proactively prevent communications that could trigger litigation or unwanted public attention—say, related to antitrust, workplace discrimination, securities violations or employment law."

"Language barriers are a fundamental impediment to international business and travel, costing untold billions in lost productivity every year."

"More profoundly, the inability for people around the world to understand one another inhibits the advancement of grand global goals and species-level harmony."

"BLANC offers AI-powered translations for video. Its AI platform takes a video with spoken dialogue in one language and applies AI to quickly reproduce that video with the dialogue in another language, doing so in a way that the speakers’ lip movements continue to look natural."

"Lilt is a notable growth-stage player working on machine translation."

"The company was founded by two NLP researchers at Google Translate who came to appreciate that an AI solution like Google Translate could not, on its own, be relied upon to deliver automated language translation with the robustness demanded by enterprise and government organizations."

"One last startup worth mentioning in this category is NeuralSpace."

"NeuralSpace was founded on a simple but powerful insight: the vast majority of cutting-edge research in NLP is conducted in English, yet 95% of the world does not speak English."

"By ingesting vast troves of unstructured data from video calls, phone calls, email exchanges, CRMs and other communication channels, today’s language AI can extract actionable insights about how salespeople are performing and what they can do to improve."

"The runaway leader in this category is Gong, which has raised close to $600 million in venture funding. According to the company, its technology boosts average revenue per sales rep by 27%, translating into massive ROI for its customers."

"This raises an interesting question: might an opportunity exist for an upstart to build a more cutting-edge version of Gong, powered by the latest transformer-based advances in language AI, and take market share from the category leader by offering a more intelligent product?"

"Aircover, which raised a seed round last year, and Wingman, which came out of Y Combinator in 2019, are two examples."

"Unlike Gong, which provides analytics only after sales calls are finished, both of these startups provide real-time in-call coaching for sales reps."

"Most organizations interested in using conversational AI interfaces to interact with their customers—say, a bank, a hotel chain, an airline—lack the requisite technical resources to navigate the latest NLP technologies and build their own chatbot platforms from scratch."

"And a lot goes into building an enterprise-grade conversational AI interface: handling data privacy and security requirements, integrating with third-party applications, building the infrastructure to support deployment at scale, providing a graceful “fallback mechanism” when the bot is stumped and human intervention is necessary."

"Rasa’s AI stack is open-sourced, with over 600 contributors and over 10 million downloads. This open-source strategy gives Rasa’s customers greater transparency and control over the conversational AI interfaces that they build and deploy."

"One specific type of enterprise chatbot has proven to be a sufficiently large market opportunity that it gets its own section: chatbots to automate employee help desks."

"The leading player in this category is Moveworks, which raised a $200 million Series C from Tiger Global last year."

"Another well-funded competitor is Espressive. Espressive claims that its chatbot platform can resolve between 50% and 70% of all employee helpdesk tickets without human assistance, recouping over a week of productivity per employee per year."

"Duplex is an AI system that, in a remarkably human-sounding voice, can place phone calls on behalf of human users to complete routine tasks like booking a dinner reservation or a hair appointment."

"Replicant is one promising startup applying voice AI to automate contact center agent activity, reducing wait times for customers and cutting costs for companies."

"AI Rudder sells to customers in financial services and e-commerce, two industries that make extensive use of call centers."

"The company’s AI system can not only speak a wide range of different languages but can also adopt the appropriate regional accent depending on the caller."

"One last startup of note in this category is Resemble AI, which specializes in generating realistic human voices using generative adversarial networks (GANs)."

"Resemble’s synthetic voices can speak with all the nuance and range of a human—for instance, whispering or communicating with various emotions—and are finding use cases from video games to advertising."

"Co-founded by AI legend Sebastian Thrun (the creator of Google X and Google’s self-driving car program) and two of his Stanford PhD students, Cresta is the most pedigreed competitor in this category."

"Cresta focuses on providing personalized coaching to contact center agents in real-time, as opposed to post-conversation, with an omnichannel platform that spans phone calls and text chats."

"Facebook alone reportedly spent $13 billion on content moderation between 2016 and 2021, including paying Accenture $500 million per year to work on the problem."

"Spectrum Labs is one promising startup applying AI to combat online toxicity, with a focus on four industries: marketplaces, social platforms, gaming services and dating applications."

"According to the company, its technology allows online platforms to increase detection of toxic behaviors by 10x while reducing content moderation efforts by 50% on average."

"Another interesting player in this category is Logically. Based in the U.K., Logically focuses on misinformation and disinformation."

"Many of Logically’s clients are governments, which use its technology for issues including national security, election integrity and COVID-19 misinformation. The company also counts TikTok as a customer."

"While opportunities for vertical-specific NLP applications do exist in some other industries, for instance financial services and law, no sector offers a greater breadth of language AI use cases than healthcare."

"In part this is simply because healthcare is such a massive market: at over $4 trillion, it is the largest sector of the U.S. economy, accounting for a staggering 19.7% of the country’s entire GDP."

"Healthcare-specific AI stacks and data pipelines also make sense given the stringent data privacy requirements in healthcare, reflected in regulations like HIPAA"

"Using AI to automate these interactions can expand access to healthcare, reduce costs, and streamline triage by making expert health guidance available without the need for human physicians’ expensive time."

"The average wait time to see a mental health professional in the United States is nearly 2 months; last year, almost 60% of those with mental health issues did not receive any treatment."

"The leading startup building mental health chatbot technology is Woebot, which has raised close to $150 million to date from investors including NEA and Temasek."

"Another important pain point that NLP can help solve is navigating the vast troves of unstructured data in healthcare."

"Healthcare data is incredibly messy, as anyone who has been exposed to the modern healthcare system knows. Relevant clinical and pharmaceutical information is typically free-form, poorly organized and spread across disparate data sources, from siloed EHRs to difficult-to-edit PDFs."

"DigitalOwl is an Israeli startup applying machine learning to enable health insurers to automate the review of medical records, allowing these insurers to process claims more efficiently and accurately."

"In a different corner of the healthcare universe, Infinitus is another fast-growing startup to keep an eye on. Infinitus offers voice AI technology—what the company has termed “VoiceRPA”—to automate routine phone calls for providers, insurers and pharmacies."