SafetyDetectives recently had an interview with Herman Schutte, the innovative founder of SiteSpeakAI, to delve into his journey and the evolution of his groundbreaking platform. With two decades of experience as a web developer in both South Africa and the US, Herman has a wealth of knowledge in creating software solutions for businesses and consumers. His passion for simplifying and automating web presence management led him to develop various SaaS applications, culminating in the creation of SiteSpeakAI. Driven by the need for an affordable and efficient customer support solution, Herman designed SiteSpeakAI to automate customer interactions and provide round-the-clock assistance.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to create SiteSpeakAI?
I’ve been a software, specifically web developer, for the past 20 years. I’ve worked at various companies in South Africa and the US, building software used by businesses and consumers. In 2011, I created one of the first social embedding tools that allowed you to embed your Instagram feed on your website. Since then, I’ve made various SaaS apps to help consumers and businesses improve and automate parts of their web presence. I needed to include a customer support chatbot for each of my Saas apps to support my customers. As you probably know, solutions like Intercom can become expensive and require a dedicated support agent to monitor the incoming chats. This requirement led me to create SiteSpeakAI, which I could use to automate customer support for my SaaS apps, reduce cost, and provide a 24/7 solution without monitoring the incoming chats myself.
What is the core mission of SiteSpeakAI, and how does it aim to revolutionize customer support?
SiteSpeakAI’s core mission is to make customer support automation with AI not only easy but also cost-effective for any business. We achieve this by offering an advanced yet remarkably user-friendly intelligent chatbot that companies can easily train on their own content, from web pages to databases. Our solution also simplifies the integration of your custom chatbot into your website, with a range of integration options and support for popular CMS.
What differentiates SiteSpeakAI from other chatbot solutions available in the market?
SiteSpeakAI has some unique features that are not currently available in other chatbot solutions:
- Chat with your database: This lets you connect to any SQLite database and have your chatbot answer questions related to your company data.
- Speech services: Let visitors chat with your chatbot using their voices and get an audio response.
- Support for the latest AI models: For example, we’ve just added support for Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic.
- Custom restriction levels: Businesses can choose how closely their chatbots should stick to the content they have been trained on.
- Localization: SiteSpeakAI is fully localized and can be adapted to any language.
- Support for reranking – using Cohere Rerank 3, we can provide more accurate responses to user questions than the standard RAG pipeline would typically provide
How do you handle the challenges of keeping the AI updated with the latest information and trends?
SiteSpeakAI was built using frameworks like Langchain, which makes it very easy to add new models and features as they are released by the AI model providers. For example, new models can be added almost instantly once the provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) has been configured. For our customers, we’ve also made it very easy to set their chatbots to automatically retrain on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis, which means their bots are always up to date with the latest changes.
What kind of analytics and metrics does SiteSpeakAI provide to businesses to help them improve their customer support?
We provide analytics about the number of interactions with each chatbot, messages per visitor, clicks on links suggested by the chatbot, positive and negative feedback related to each chatbot response, and question categorization. All of these metrics, especially the question categorization, can help businesses identify gaps in their knowledge base and improve their customer support.
How can businesses measure the ROI of implementing SiteSpeakAI in their customer support system?
Businesses can measure the ROI of adding SiteSpeakAI to their website by the reduction in customer support requests that have to be addresses manually, as well as an increase in lead capture.