SoundHound AI: LivePerson deal may bolster its AI agent ambitions

SoundHound AI is looking to move beyond its core voice AI market to orchestrate broader AI agents and the early interest for its new OASYS platform indicates the company may have a shot.

OASYS is SoundHound's platform for orchestrating AI voice AI agents as well as third-party systems beyond voice. OASYS became generally available in May and 30% to 45% of customers are either in beta and pilots or migrating.

SoundHound's goal is to have 80% to 90% of its customer base on OASYS by the end of the year.

The company's recent second quarter results highlighted early momentum for OASYS and SoundHound's acquisition of LivePerson may give the firm a broader enterprise footprint.

"With OASYS, we are winning in demos, we are winning in RFPs, we are winning in pilots, and we are winning as we scale with our customers in production," said SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer. "OASYS demos are absolutely delighting new and existing customers, and they show in our renewal rates and our exceptional win rates. We are now moving quickly with our prospects from demo to contract signing in a matter of months. And we're also converting pilots to large implementations at a record pace.

With OASYS, SoundHound is looking to expand its footprint beyond its in-house voice models. OASYS can manage multiple models.

In the second quarter, SoundHound reported a second quarter net loss of $42.8 million, or 10 cents a share, on revenue of $61.9 million, up 45% from a year ago The non-GAAP loss was 2 cents a share. The results topped expectations.

As for the outlook, SoundHound projected 2026 revenue to be between $230 million and $260 million. The guidance doesn't include LivePerson, but when the deal closes SoundHound said it will update its outlook. LivePerson shareholders are currently voting on the SoundHound acquisition. Shareholders need to vote for the transaction. Abstaining from voting is considered a vote against the deal. LivePerson said 97% of shareholders have voted for the deal.

Mohajer said SoundHound's focus on voice-powered AI agents and workflows is paying off. The company has positioned OASYS as a domain-tuned platform that goes beyond what horizontal AI orchestration platforms provide. The target domains include call center, customer experience, IT and HR helpdesk and frontline operations in retail, restaurants and automotive. The core pitch is that OASYS is pre-tuned and production grade.

SoundHound said it inked an OASYS contract with a healthcare company and extended deals with automotive, banking, insurance and financial services customers. James Hom, Co-Founder, Interim CFO, Chief Product Officer & Director, said SoundHound signed seven deals with healthcare companies in the second quarter.

Mohajer said OASYS is powered by SoundHound's Polaris speech foundation model and the company plans to augment its foundation model with specialized LLMs built on its interaction data. "We expect the results of these investments will be better quality and lower cost for our customers and more control, independence, higher profit margin and differentiation for SoundHound," he said.

Going forward, SoundHound said OASYS will be used to integrate acquisitions. Mohajer added that OASYS will be able to integrate LivePerson's installed base. LivePerson provides a chat platform with SoundHound focused on voice. LivePerson customers have been requesting voice as a core feature.

Mohajer's bet is that SoundHound will be the AI engine of LivePerson and create an omnichannel agentic AI offering.

"All the new customers we expect will utilize OASYS. There's no reason for them not to. For legacy customers, we are converting them at a pace that they are comfortable with. Some of these customers have been on a legacy platform for many years, and they are very loyal to it. They are very happy with the results. The last thing we want to do is to disturb that," said Mohajer. "Some of them are very eager to switch and some of them will take a little bit more time. It's really going to be at a pace that they are comfortable with it, but OASYS is ready to take them on now."

OASYS takeaways

In a demonstration, SoundHound walked through OASYS and its ability to manage agentic workflows across multiple platforms.

Here's a look at the takeaways:

• OASYS, short for Orchestrated Agent System, is positioned as a single pane of glass for AI agent management end to end.
• The company has an approach called Human-Assisted Resolution (HAR) that integrates human-in-the-loop processes. SoundHound noted that AI remains the driver of the customer conversation in OASYS, but can orchestrate targeted interventions by human experts.
• HAR has two modes including understanding assist for clarifying an utterance and orchestration assist where a human performs a restricted or sensitive action. The demo scenario featured retail returns where a policy required human approvals, but the customer never left of the automated experience.
• SoundHound's platform is designed for real-world reliability in voice-heavy environments. The system uses SoundHound's proprietary voice AI models, but customers can also bring their own models. While most LLMs are designed for text, SoundHound's models are voice native and built to navigate interruptions and noise.
• Model choices abound. OASYS is powered by its own foundational models focused on voice, but also taps into multiple platforms such as Amazon Bedrock and Hugging Face. Customers can run on SoundHound's voice model and fine-tuned LLMs for CX and add their own models.
• Each assistant in OASYS can orchestrate multiple agents and they can be instruction or workflow driven. OASYS can leverage context from historical contact center transcripts, propose new agents and function updates and evaluate LLMs.