Kyle Kilcoyne didn't take much time off after the startup where he used to work was acquired by Facebook.
Boston-based Confirm, which developed a technology that enabled verification of government-issued identification, shut down in late January as both its team and technology rolled into the social media giant.
Less than three months after, Kilcoyne, a former head of marketing and communications at Confirm, is one of the three co-founders of a new Cambridge-based startup in the space of "A.I. voice commerce."
Called AVOX.io, the company launched in early April and is led by Kevin Bedell, who held engineering leadership roles at Zipcar and Amazon Alexa. Todd Chapin, another former executive at Zipcar, is chief product officer, while Kilcoyne is COO.
The focus of AVOX.io is building tools to enable small and medium online retailers to service customers through personal voice assistants, from Amazon's Alexa to Google's Assistant.
"Right now, the market is pretty early," Kilcoyne said. "There are estimates that it's going to grow enormously by 2025."
The way the voice market is designed today, as Kilcoyne noted, presented the opportunity to address a gap. If online retailers sell their products within Amazon Marketplace, they can leverage Alexa for voice selling capabilities; they don't necessarily have access to an Alexa's equivalent should they use other online retail platforms, and here's where Avox comes into the picture.
"What we're doing is trying to democratize access to those voice capabilities and allow online retailers to be able to provide that same level of service and support through their own website, their own e-commerce platform," Kilcoyne said.
Launched in mid-April, the first product coming out of AVOX.io is "ShopClerk: Where’s my order?," a Shopify application that integrates Amazon Alexa directly into Shopify stores. The app allows customers to track orders using Amazon Alexa by saying, "Alexa, ask Shop Clerk: where’s my order?"
Shopify, an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems, is used by more than 500,000 businesses in 175 countries as of August last year, with more than 1.2 million people actively using its backend platform.
Currently, Kilcoyne said that AVOX.io serves a couple dozens customers and it's in the middle of raising a seed round as a privately-backed company.
