When was the last time that you picked up your phone, saw that you had a missed call and unread voicemail, and actually took the time to listen to it? If you have a smartphone (and who doesn’t), there is a decently strong chance that you typically ignore voicemails altogether—but of course, this means you’re also likely to miss something important. 

Voxist is a Paris Founder Institute portfolio company that provides the next generation of voicemail: voice-to-text transcription solutions delivered where you need them, and personalized voicemail greetings for the people you care about hearing from most. Led by Founder & CEO Karel Bourgois, a telecom industry veteran, Voxist is the mobile voicemail solution for busy professionals and entrepreneurs. According to CEO Bourgois,

In today’s world, where we are under so much pressure and time constraints, people don’t really have time to listen to voicemails anymore. And, at the same time, we all expect something very personalized and we don’t like hearing the voice mail greetings that are standard or sometimes just a number, and you don’t know if you called the correct person.  

Where Personal Voice Meets Productivity 

Personalization is where Voxist really shines, bringing the element emotional connection back to voicemail, a technology concept that otherwise has not changed much in recent years—while at the same time, bringing more productivity to the user. For example, if your mom calls, Voxist can send a personalized greeting to her; but if your partner calls, a different personalized greeting can be sent to them.

While great for personal relationships, it also works perfectly for business purposes, letting each of your important clients be impressed by their own personal greeting. In addition to the personalized responses, Voxist makes it easy to read a transcription of your voicemails in hundreds of languages, regardless of carrier or device, and can even forward transcripts to your email.

According to CEO Bourgois in our recent interview,

It’s a product that’s really useful for people that get a lot of cold calls, and it’s for very different types of customer segments. A lot of our users are called by sales people or generally receive a lot of calls, and there would be no way for them to listen to all the voicemails.

In fact, this was one of the motivating factors for Founder & CEO Karel Bourgois in creating Voxist: as an entrepreneur himself, it would have helped him in the past to read important voicemails on the way to a meeting, or in other situations where he simply couldn’t pick up the phone. 

Reading it is much faster. It’s also used by lawyers, plumbers, executives, anyone who is really dependent on their mobile, and doesn’t really have a support system where they say ‘okay it doesn’t matter anyway, someone is back at the office and will take care of the problem.’

Voxist now lets users create text-to-speech greetings customized for the caller in real-time, letting you focus on tasks in the moment.

Prior to launching Voxist, Bourgois spent the past 20 years in the telecom industry. For the past decade specifically, he has worked as a product manager for Alcatel as well as Orange. It was during his time at Orange when he first came up with the concept for Voxist, and asked permission to develop the solution internally—and now it’s a full blown company. Bourgois explains his longer term technology vision this way, 

My view in the long term is that you’ll be on a call with someone, and on the call will be this AI that will be there that can help you. ‘Hi Dustin, how are you?’ ‘Voxist, can you tell me if we have a slot available next week where I can have a meeting with James?’ and from here Voxist could look into your calendars and arrange a booking time. 

Though that feature may not be a reality yet, it’s a similar concept to how chatbots are already taking over text-based support, for everything from sales to customer support. And most large companies are already adopting the technology. For voice, it would be a similar concept, and deliver an Alexa or Siri-type integration right into the live phone call and voicemail user interface.

With a substantial telecoms industry insider track record, and early signs of achieving big wins like being featured on France’s BFM Business below (the country’s most-watched news channel; interview in French) to discuss voice and retail, Voxist is already making waves.

Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.85BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.

See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.