I am excited to announce that Alan AI has been selected as a 2019 TiE50 Winner in the prestigious TiE50 Awards Program. This awards competition, now in its tenth year, is a program of TiEcon, the world’s largest conference for tech entrepreneurs. Alan AI was recognized by TiE for being the only Voice AI platform that enables enterprises to add a complete Visual Voice experience within their existing applications instantly.

Enterprises want to offer conversational voice interfaces for their customers and employees. Unlike consumer use cases, most enterprises have custom and complex business workflows. So far, enterprises have to be content with the same voice assistants that are designed for consumer use cases. Alan is fundamentally challenging how enterprises should think about their voice strategy and is offering them a unique platform to add Visual Voice experience within their apps.

Alan is not your typical request-response voice assistant, Alan offers a Voice Control for the entire app leveraging both dialog and visual context, supports your custom workflows and understands your business application language, all while preserving your enterprise privacy.

The TiE50 Awards will be presented to the winners during a ceremony on May 10th during TiEcon at Santa Clara Convention Center. Contact Gaurav Kuchhal to meet in person at TiEcon from May 10th — 11th.

About Tie50

Now celebrating its tenth year, TiE50 Awards provides a one-of-a-kind showcase for the world’s top technology and technology-enabled startups. TiE Silicon Valley’s premier annual awards program is keenly contested by thousands of early- to mid-stage startups of all sizes representing a wide range of verticals. Applications are rigorously reviewed by a panel of judges including venture capitalists, angels, successful entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. Since its inception, 84 percent of TiE50 winners and top startups have been funded at a total of over $1 billion. Many of these companies went on to acquisition or IPO with 29 of the exits at over $100 million.

About TiEcon

TiEcon is the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs with participation from top technology companies, leading venture capital firms, and global service providers. Delegates range from CEOs of top companies to first-time entrepreneurs as well as corporate executives and investment professionals. TiEcon was listed as one of the 10 best conferences for ideas and entrepreneurship by Worth Magazine, along with TED and the World Economic Forum. TiEcon 2018 attracted 5,000 attendees from 22 countries. More information: TiEcon.org

Originally published at http://blogs.alan.app on May 10, 2019.

Looking forward to the talk at the VOICE summit in Newark on July 24 how Voice and AI will transform every enterprise. We have entered the voice-first era, where voice will not just be used for simple tasks like control the meeting or book conference room, it will be used to complete mission-critical business tasks. I will weigh in on how enterprises can add voice to their applications and get a fully immersive voice-visual experience during VOICE18 “Enterprise: Where No Voice Has Gone Before” panel.

Originally published at blogs.alan.app on July 23, 2018.

2017 was a year of Cambrian explosion for voice-enabled devices. Echo Dot was Amazon’s best-seller during the holiday period. CES this year offered a glimpse into the future of conversational voice: a world where consumers can use voice to control everything — thermostats, lamps, sprinklers, security systems, smartwatch, fitness bracelet, smart TV, or their vehicles.

2018 will be the year for Voice to enter the Enterprise and transform how work gets done. Here are a few important factors for Voice to make a seminal impact in the enterprise:

• Conversational Experience: Enterprise Voice AI should provide a human-like conversational experience. Unlike request-response, we should be able to interrupt the Assistant anytime. While you are getting your daily briefing by saying “how does my day looks like” and listening to the summary of your meetings, urgent emails, direct messages and important tasks; you should be able to interrupt anytime and ask to “Text Laura that I am running 10 min late, and move my next meeting by half an hour”.
• Contextually Intelligent: Today, we use a whole array of applications to get things done at work. Enterprise Voice AI need to preserve the context of the conversation so the user can have a deep meaningful dialogue to complete the business workflow drawing information from different data sources — without switching the applications. For example, a technician may ask “Where is my next appointment” followed by “Which cable modem should I bring”. Enterprise Voice Assistant will need to preserve the customer context from the first question to pull up the right modem information.
• Proactive Predictions: Voice AI for the enterprise should not just respond to the user commands, it should also be able to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to proactively make recommendations and predictions to accelerate the task. For example, when a Delivery Service guy asks “how do I get to the next delivery”, Voice Assistant should provide directions but also proactively tell “By the way, the door code is 1290 to get access to the building.”
• Domain Specific: Every enterprise and every industry is unique, and has its own lingua franca. Enterprise Voice AI should be able to apply Machine Learning (ML) to learn the unique vocabulary of every domain to improve the speech-to-meaning. The assistant should cumulatively learn from each user interaction such that it can make recommendations to other colleagues about what to say to complete the task.

Voice AI will not just be used for simple work tasks like control the meeting or book a conference room. It will be used to complete the complex business workflows because as we think about it, the more complex the scenario, the more it benefits from voice AI to help users get what they need quickly without switching applications.

2018 will be the groundbreaking year business leaders in every industry will wake up to the importance of voice AI.

Originally published at blogs.alan.app on February 10, 2018.