While most of its peers in the contact center automation segment focus on helping organizations improve the quality of their support, Pindrop Inc. makes its living separating legitimate callers from potential scammers. Its software has been adopted by three of the four largest banks in the U.S. and last week marked another milestone after attracting $75 million in funding from a group of investors led by Google Inc.’s private equity arm.

Much of the capital will go towards improving the underlying analytics technology, which not only searches for inconsistencies in the voice of a speaker but also factors the background noise (or lack thereof) into its calculations. The result is then juxtaposed with additional details like caller location to produce a risk score that support agents can use in order to determine how cautiously they should handle every request.

On the opposite end of the segmentation spectrum, Versium Analytics Inc. is harnessing machine learning in order to help marketers single out the prospects who are most likely to purchase their products. Its aptly-named LifeData Predictive Lead Score service launched on Wednesday with a graphical interface that makes it possible to identify exactly which website visitor is interested in what offering price range using drag-and-drop filters. The platform bases its estimates on more than 800 billion online activity records that the startup has collected from a combination of public and paid information sources.

The rise of providers such as Pindrop and Verisum comes as analytics technology starts finding use in every part of business, even mundane tasks like organizing inboxes. That’s the task Microsoft set out to simplify with the new iteration of Cortana that was debuted last week, which can remind a user to keep a promise they made to colleagues in an email. The virtual assistant is also receiving the ability to flag last-minute meetings and other calendar items that may fall outside normal working hours.

Image via Stevebidmead