Walter McDonald '27 and Stephen Lim '27 created OrbitPhone to help small businesses manage their calls and appointments.
Walter McDonald, 27, found himself stranded this summer when his car broke down and his favorite local mechanic wasn't answering his calls. The University of Rochester student turned his frustration into a business idea. The third-year data science and math double major knew mechanics had a great job, but as a small business owner, he was often too busy fixing cars to coordinate logistics with customers.
“We realized this was a problem that many businesses across the country were facing,” McDonald says. “We are in the age of automation and there are easy solutions, but many business owners don’t know about them because there are technology gaps.”
After fixing up the car, MacDonald teamed up with roommate Stephen Lim ’27, a computer science and finance major, to create an easy-to-use system that allows small business owners to set up their own virtual reception desk powered by artificial intelligence.
Building a technical foundation
MacDonald spent a summer working at Soleo Communications, gaining significant experience in speech systems and natural language processing. This position was obtained through a summer internship program at the Eurochester-based New York State Center of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He was tasked with building an AI voice system that could take voice instructions from customers, map them to backend systems, and determine which insurance policy best suited the customer's needs. He used many of the same concepts he learned with Soleo for OrbitPhone.
After several months of development, McDonald and Lim launched the company, OrbitPhone, in late November.
answer all calls
OrbitPhone provides a human-like assistant that can answer calls, take reservations, and sync with clients' digital calendars to provide a quick overview of each transaction. The product promises to be easy to set up in less than two minutes, and if the client already has a website, the system collects information from the website to further speed up the process.
While products that provide AI receptionists for large enterprises already exist, McDonald says OrbitPhone aims to bridge the gap in price and ease of use for the small and medium-sized business market.
Ariel Herrera-Molina, who owns Guava Spa in Homer, New York, was one of the first people to sign up for OrbitPhone. She and her employees are all estheticians, but they are often too busy with clients to answer the phone. She said her mentor advised her to consider using AI to help her business, and she was excited when a UROchester student suggested a potential solution.
“I run a spa and I'm the one doing the work, so I'm in service all day. I check in and check out customers, I do marketing, I do everything,” says Herrera Molina. “It's literally impossible for me to be there and answer the phone. I know that just getting a voicemail can scare people off, and sometimes they just hang up before they can actually leave a voicemail. I wanted to find something that would help me capture those leads that I was missing.”
Expand access to AI tools
Mr McDonald and Mr Lim hope their product will help level the playing field for local small and medium-sized businesses looking to compete with larger companies.
“We want to expand what people can do and democratize technology,” McDonald says. “It’s unfair that big companies can listen in on every customer call and get all that valuable data, but small businesses don’t have the same opportunity.”
Since the launch of OrbitPhone, McDonald and Lim have worked to incorporate customer feedback to enhance the product. They plan to add features such as further voice customization and outbound calling to allow customers to follow up with leads.
Mr Lim said it was a dream come true to combine his interests in both software programming and business to start a company like this. He said UROchester's open curriculum gave him the flexibility to pursue both paths, and he was pleased to have found supportive friends and business partners at McDonald's who could work together toward a common goal.
“It's a whole learning process as we build this and figure things out ourselves,” Lim says. “I love getting first-hand, hands-on experience making products. It's hard not to get excited about building something like this. That's what I came to school for.”
