Most of the voice solutions I've seen kind of nibble around the edges of this, don't get traction, and slowly die a slow death somewhere deep in the middle of the RFP or evaluation process.
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I asked him to run me through the pitch, and John gave a practiced recital:
Most salespeople are human-centered and enjoy talking with other individuals — but they hate dealing with computers. If a salesperson is selling shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, the best part of their day will be talking to the customer; the worst part will be when they have to go back to the office and deal with their company's reporting software. More likely than not, this will be Salesforce, the most widely used software for tracking sales.
Salesforce is ugly. Their interface is clunky. The poor salesperson has to sit down, bring up the website, click on a bunch of buttons, and navigate through a bunch of forms. The worst day of high school math was probably more fun for them.
Celelot aimed to change that. Instead of dealing with Salesforce, the salesperson would simply pull out their phone and send a text message to the Celelot system. For example, "Spoke to Carol. I just sold 1 million bottles of shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, rev 500,000. Contract August 1. Delivery September 1." We would use a set of computer techniques known as Natural Language Processing, or NLP, to take a message like that and pull out all the fields that were significant to Salesforce:
Contact: Carol Harrington
Customer: Sheraton Hotels
Product: Shampoo
Quantity: 1,000,000
Revenue: $500,000
Close Date: August 1
Delivery Date: September 1
Celelot would automatically identify who sent the message, connect it with their Salesforce account, and log the information in the system. Salespeople would never have to interact with Salesforce directly.
Apart from streamlining the reporting process for Salesforce specifically, Celelot could potentially become the default interface for all sales-reporting software (a category officially known as Customer Relationship Managers, or CRMs, of which Salesforce and Pipedrive are two well-known examples). That would be game changing.
But the real question to determine if it's a viable product/business is does it drive enough value that people will actually buy it, use it, and remain paying customers?
I'd say in your example above, it likely won't massively decrease costs (the salespeople are still having to interact with a CRM) or drive increased incremental revenue in any real way.