SoundHound Closes Its LivePerson Deal to Build a Voice-and-Chat Giant

SoundHound AI has completed its acquisition of LivePerson, the two companies said on September 4, closing a deal that stitches together voice assistants and text messaging under one roof. LivePerson shareholders had approved the merger two days earlier.

The logic is straightforward. SoundHound built its name on voice, the systems that take drive-through orders and answer calls without a human on the line. LivePerson comes from the other side of customer service, the chat windows and text threads that companies use to handle questions over web, mobile and social channels. Put them together and you can, in theory, follow a customer from a phone call to a text message to a web chat without losing the thread.

What SoundHound gets

The acquired assets are the point. LivePerson brings a customer roster that includes 25 of the Fortune 100 and a patent portfolio of more than 750 filings, along with a messaging network that already carries a large volume of business conversations. SoundHound plans to fold that infrastructure into its OASYS platform, its attempt at a single system spanning voice, web, mobile, SMS and social. The company also named John Collins as chief financial officer of the combined business.

The harder part comes next

Buying the pieces is the easy step. Integrations like this tend to look tidy in the press release and messier in practice, as two engineering cultures, two billing systems and two sets of enterprise contracts get pulled together. LivePerson had struggled for years as a standalone company, which is part of why it was available to buy in the first place.

The bet SoundHound is making is that conversational AI is heading toward a single layer that does not care whether a customer is speaking or typing. That is a reasonable read of where the market is going. Whether SoundHound can actually deliver the seamless version of it, rather than two acquired products sharing a logo, is the question the next year will answer.