Nikola Mrkšić

Nikola Mrkšić is co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, the enterprise voice-assistant company he started in 2017 with Cambridge colleagues Shawn Wen and Eddy Su. The product focuses on phone-based customer service rather than demo chatbots.

Cambridge dialogue systems

Mrkšić studied computer science and mathematics at Cambridge and did a Ph.D. with Steve Young on data-driven language understanding across use cases and languages. He also worked at Young's startup VocalIQ on spoken dialogue systems and later on Apple's Siri team. In a Unite.AI interview he said conversational AI "kept me busy ever since" because it still needs scientific and engineering breakthroughs.

Founding PolyAI for real phone calls

He and his co-founders realized the sophisticated dialogue systems they studied had few commercial homes. They founded PolyAI to build multi-turn, transactional assistants for everyday customer service. Mrkšić argues that phone remains a primary channel, and that good voice AI must handle slang, interruptions, multiple intents, and noisy environments without forcing callers to repeat themselves.

On what makes conversational AI good

In the same Unite.AI series he draws a sharp line: a good product "will consistently understand what users mean and will never make users repeat themselves." A great one follows the user's train of thought across mixed intents and contexts. That bar is how PolyAI talks about encoder models, entity extraction, and ASR orchestration for contact-center deployments.