(Yicai Global) Sept. 29 -- Nanjing Yunwen Network Technology Co., a customer service operation firm based in China's eastern Jiangsu province, has secured CNY30 million (USD4.54 million) in A-round financing to hire new talent and develop new applications for its products, 36Kr reported yesterday.

The firm will use the funds to install its app-based products onto more hardware devices and add intelligent man-machine interaction features to a range of corporate services, said Mao Chuanyu, chief operations officer.

Yunwen release its first product in 2013. It specializes in developing speech recognition and interactive robots for corporate users. The bots function similarly to Apple Inc.'s [NASDAQ:AAPL] 'intelligent assistant' Siri, but can be customized to suit client preferences, Wang Qingchen, chief executive, added.

The company has unveiled a software-as-a-service (Saas) voice-interactive robot. Clients can install the system themselves and pay for the service based on the volume of queries processed. Yunwen also offers custom solutions with phonetic and semantic processing capabilities for large corporations, and provides services covering underlying technology development and applications.

Yunwen's services have four main applications. The core sector is developing business-oriented customer service automation systems; virtual assistants that are able to behave interactively. Its services can also be used within a client's firm, replacing conventional man-machine interaction with voice interactivity. The remaining two applications are voice recognition and semantic analysis for smart devices, and data collation and analysis.

The firm's SaaS platform has more than 30,000 registered users from a range of industries, including e-commerce, information technology, tourism, government services and electronics.

Yunwen expects to earn CNY20 million (USD2.99 million) in revenue this year, twice last year's earnings, Mao added, at a gross margin of almost 90 percent. Its capital expenditure mostly goes on research and development; the firm hasn't carried out any large-scale advertising.