On March 27th, 2019, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks (NY Times, WIRED). The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share. Our Voice AI service is named as Alan to give tribute to the forward-thinking computer scientist Alan Turing.
“We need fundamental additions to this toolbox we have created to reach machines that operate at the level of true human understanding,” Dr. Bengio said. We believe that by adding spoken language understanding and voice visual experiences while guaranteeing privacy is a fundamental requirement to accelerate the adoption of deep learning technologies in speech for every enterprise.
We founded Alan as a voice AI platform that draws upon the latest advances in deep learning by adding our unique enterprise application-specific AI. Just as Waymo has the potential to build an AI-enabled platform for autonomous vehicles, we believe that Alan™ will be the voice AI platform to enable every enterprise application to have a natural human voice interface.