AI is swiftly being injected into every business operation to make processes faster and more convenient. User research and video content analysis are relatively new areas where AI is establishing itself as quite the frontrunner. To get a deeper understanding of how AI is performing in these newly found applications, we speak with Paul Cheek, CEO, and founder at Vempathy.Tech. Read on!

What inspired you to start Vempathy.Tech? Tell us the story.

We started Vempathy after running into problems with the user research process while consulting for other companies. I had hours and hours of usability test and screen recordings to review but knew well that I was looking to find the short clips in which my users came across as confused or frustrated.

As a problem solver, I decided to begin analyzing the videos to identify those insightful, thirty-second clips. Turns out, it worked, and I was able to condense over ten hours of videos into under five minutes of video that would influence the design process.

In June 2017, we began conducting research to better understand the pain points involved in the user research process and shortly thereafter we began building. The initial prototype of Vempathy was built overnight and an MVP followed in just three weeks time. Since then we have been iterating on the initial MVP and working with beta users to refine our products.

What is the competitive advantage that Vempathy enjoys? Do you think it will be sustainable?

We are currently the only user research platform to apply artificial intelligence in the video analysis process. Doing so allows us to reduce the amount of manual work for researchers and analysts, which sets us apart from competitors who require their teams and customers to conduct all video analysis manually. Our competitive advantage can be maintained because we have developed a video analysis software that, unlike off-the-shelf video analysis software, caters specifically to solving challenges involved in user research.

Tell us more about your emotion detection algorithm.

Our emotion detection algorithms analyze emotion data from facial expressions, the tone of voice, and sentiment of speech to provide the highest quality emotion analysis.

What are your thoughts on analyzing customer experience with AI?

Incumbent firms across industries are now routinely being disrupted by upstarts that provide very similar products and services. What sets them apart is their customer experience, which allows them to not only build but also retain market share. Customer experience will define who is successful moving forward. To build and improve their customer experiences, companies must include research in their design processes, but research is very resource intensive. Applying AI (artificial intelligence) in customer experience analysis allows for faster iteration and improvement with fewer resources. Overall, these improvements result in a faster pace of innovation, increased competition, and thus boost economic conditions.

What are your future plans? 

We are building an all-in-one user research toolkit that uses AI to automate many of the ad-hoc, manual processes user researchers employ today. Our solutions are serving startups and SMBs and we expect the most growth from servicing larger enterprise clients through integrations with all of the other industry-leading user research platforms.

Why did you choose a .TECH domain name? 

We chose the Vempathy.Tech domain name because it is most relevant to the business that we are building. Our vision is to help companies build empathy with their customers using video analysis technology so a .tech domain name was relevant for us.