South Korean BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) company Ubase Group said on Tuesday it will acquire voice-recognition artificial intelligence (AI) startup ReturnZero.

The company said ReturnZero is a voice AI specialist with AI speech recognition and engineering capabilities. It said ReturnZero built real-time processing performance (RTF) and concurrent access efficiency based on a backend server architecture optimised for high-performance, large-volume processing.

It said ReturnZero has strengths in voice-to-text processing speed and Speech-to-Text (STT) technology competitiveness. It also has diarization technology, 30 patents and specialised developers.

Ubase said it aims to accelerate its shift to an AI agent-centred business model by internalising voice AI capabilities through the acquisition. It aims to commercialise an end-to-end counselling AI agent that handles tasks on its own from start to finish in July.

Jinwon Mok (목진원), CEO of Ubase, said the acquisition would go beyond a technical combination and add advanced AI technology to the sensibility and expertise of human counsellors, serving as a signal flare to transform the BPO industry paradigm. He said Ubase would newly define the standard for the global BPO industry in the AI era, where people and AI achieve perfect harmony, coexist and create synergy in the counselling field.