Alan AI is proud to announce a landmark achievement in Generative AI with the granting of US Patent No. 11,798,542, titled “Systems and Methods for Integrating Voice Controls into Applications.” This patent represents a significant leap in augmenting language understanding with a visual context and, in parallel, providing immersive user experiences for daily use in enterprises.

While the Generative AI industry is rapidly recognizing the crucial role of context (leading Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Gemini, Mistral, and LLaMa2 are constantly evolving, aiming to expand their context window to capture a broader range of information and can already handle up to 200,000 tokens); at Alan AI, we understand visual information’s pivotal role in human perception – approximately 80% of our sensory input! 

What Makes This a Game-Changer?

Our innovative approach integrates visual context with AI language understanding, creating a new paradigm in the industry. Recognizing that visual information forms a major part of human perception, we’ve developed a system that goes beyond the limitations of current language models. By incorporating visual context, we’re transforming how AI interacts with its environment, making “a picture worth millions of tokens.“

Revolutionizing RAG in LLMs with Visual Context

Alan AI’s approach innovatively augments Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with visual context when using Large Language Models (LLMs). This enhancement addresses the limitations of RAG, where input token size increases with prompt size, often leading to verbose and less controllable outputs. We provide a more relevant and precise context by integrating visual context — elements like the user’s current screen, workflow stage, and text from previous queries.

This integration means visual elements are passive data and active components in generating responses. They effectively increase the ‘context window’ of the LLM, allowing it to understand and respond to queries with a previously unattainable depth, epitomizing our philosophy that “a picture is worth millions of tokens.” This technical enhancement significantly improves AI-generated responses’ accuracy, relevance, and efficiency in enterprise environments.

Crafting an Immersive User Experience – Synchronizing Text, Voice, and Visuals

In addition, Alan AI is pushing the boundaries of Generative AI for responses. Our technology interprets visual context, such as screen and application states, allowing for precise comprehension and response crafting by updating the appropriate sections of the application GUI. Our AI Assistants do more than process requests; they guide users interactively, harmonizing text and voice with visual GUI elements for a truly immersive experience.

The Transformative Benefits for Enterprises

In the enterprise realm, accuracy and precision are paramount. Our integration of visual context with language processing ensures responses that are not just factually accurate but contextually rich and relevant. This leads to enhanced user experiences, increased productivity, and effectiveness in enterprise applications.

A New Benchmark for AI Interaction Excellence

Our commitment to integrating visual cues is about building trust. Ensuring our AI Assistants understand verbal and non-verbal communication creates a user experience that aligns with human expectations. This approach is key to successfully implementing Generative AI across various enterprise scenarios.

For additional information on Alan AI and how utilizing application context builds trust and boosts employee productivity, contact sales@alan.app.

In a significant development for the AI industry, Alan AI has achieved the “Awardable” status on the prestigious Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s (CDAO) Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. This recognition is a testament to Alan AI’s technological prowess, highly differentiated solution, and its alignment with the Department of Defense’s (DoD) stringent requirements for solutions in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). The inclusion of Alan AI in this elite group of vendors marks a milestone for the company and the ongoing collaboration between the private sector’s AI segment and government defense initiatives.

Our Tradewinds video sheds light on the persistent challenges within today’s enterprise IT landscape. It critically examines how the solutions from both established vendors and emerging startups often exacerbate these issues instead of resolving them. Against this backdrop, we introduce Alan AI’s groundbreaking solution: a comprehensive generative AI platform designed for any enterprise web or mobile application.
Alan AI stands out by streamlining complex enterprise workflows that span multiple vendor IT systems. Our platform revolutionizes how enterprises operate by enabling intuitive, human-like text or voice dialogues. These interactions are not only natural but also contextually intelligent, ensuring actions are both relevant and effective. Discover how Alan AI is redefining enterprise efficiency and transforming the IT ecosystem.

Alan AI’s Tradewinds video submission, “Alan AI – Streamlining Business Processes”, is available on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. Government Agencies interested in viewing the video solution can create a Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace account at tradewindAI.com.
Alan AI was recognized among competitive applicants to the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, whose solutions demonstrated innovation, scalability, and potential impact on DoD missions. 

Alan AI’s Path to Recognition

Alan AI’s journey to becoming an “Awardable” vendor on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace was marked by rigorous vetting and demonstrating an innovative and highly differentiated solution that solved a ubiquitous problem. By meeting these high standards, Alan AI has proven its solutions are innovative and directly address the needs of the DoD.

What Does This Mean for Alan AI?

Being an awardable vendor on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace opens up many business opportunities for Alan AI in the Government and DoD sectors. This status allows them direct access to government contracts, streamlining the collaboration process with the DoD.

Impact on the DoD and National Defense

Including Alan AI as an awardable vendor is a significant stride for the DoD in pursuing advanced technological capabilities. Alan AI’s solutions offer the potential to streamline various business and operational processes, improve decision-making, and enhance productivity within the defense infrastructure. Alan AI is well poised to provide the DoD with next-generation capabilities that increase the effectiveness of U.S. forces and support Department-wide reform efforts by addressing critical operational and business challenges.
 

About the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace:

The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is a digital repository of post-competition, readily awardable pitch videos that address the Department of Defense’s (DoD) most significant challenges in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), data, and analytics space. All awardable solutions have been assessed through complex scoring rubrics and competitive procedures and are available to Government customers with a Marketplace account. Government customers can create an account at http://www.tradewindai.com. Tradewinds is housed in the DoD’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office.

Alan AI has launched the Alan AI Voice Interface Course on the Udemy virtual education platform.

The course is designed for anyone who wants to build an in-app voice assistant that enables users to have human-like conversations. Upon completion of the course, you will become a certified voice assistant developer. *Note- You do not need to have artificial intelligence or machine learning experience to complete this course.

Who is the Alan AI Voice Assistant course for?

The course has been created keeping a couple of users in mind. Namely,

• Developers actively seeking to add voice to an app
• All developers and users looking to build a voice assistant

The voice assistant in the Alan Platform leverages AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). However, you do not need any artificial intelligence or machine learning experience to complete this course. In the course, we will guide and cover how to design your very own voice user experience and build up to a voice enabled app for a simple web application. Then you should be able to leverage this knowledge and embed a voice assistant to any other supported platform. Including: web, iOS, Android, Flutter, Ionic, Cordova, React Native, and Microsoft PowerApps.

How is the Alan AI Voice Assistant course designed?

First, you will learn how to create a voice assistant using custom voice commands. Then, you will be able to test and integrate the voice assistant you’ve created into an app using the Alan AI Platform. Finally, you will get a view of analytics and learn some best practices for building in-app voice assistants.

So we encourage you to take this course and be on your journey to creating your very own voice assistant using the Alan AI Platform! Get started at here at Alan AI Course!

Questions? Please reach out to support@alan.app or join our community Slack Channel!

To be entered into the competition, click on the link here to register. In the meantime, here are some video we’ve created for you to check out:

• Alan AI Overview
• How to Build a Voice Assistant

Hope you enter the competition. Best of luck!

In the meantime, please check out this course we designed for you. If you send in a submission of your project, let us know and we’ll provide a free code for the course.

If you would like to learn more about Alan AI in general or have any questions, please feel free to book a meeting with one of our Customer Success team members here.

We humans constantly learn from our interactions with others and improve ourselves to be continuously successful. To improve ourselves, our brains are wired to learn from external interactions with society and its members.

In contrast, all the mobile and web applications we use today have no intelligence built into them. They are rigid and have absolutely no learning capabilities. They are revised at the pace that business owners can afford to do so. Today, in December 2020, every application comes with pre-defined functionalities and use cases, where:

1. Application-owners expect their users to complete a set of tasks to have mobile or web experiences.
2. Businesses learn by interacting with and researching a small sample cohort of users to revise applications capabilities.
3. Users see revised versions of these applications at a very slow pace, with low frequency.

Learning about user experiences is very crucial for business success. However, this critical capability is incredibly slow, and the consequences of learning are even slower, especially on the bottom line.

This is destined to change in 2021.

Most learning in life takes place with conversations. In 2021, businesses’ applications will take their first steps in accelerated learning by exploiting the use of voice as a natural interface with their apps, in consonance with the AI platforms that will use voice conversations to learn and continuously improve interactions. This combination of capabilities has several significant advantages that will catalyze this uptake:

1. Voice interactions give application owners the ability to instantly understand what users would like to do with their applications. Voice interaction processed by AI software and accompanying analytics gives application-owners instant insights into user expectations. In this environment, application-owners are not restricted to a sample of users; the entire population can be analyzed. The probability of errors is almost zero.
2. AI platforms give us the ability to use Machine Learning or Supervised Learning to react to user needs. When the AI models are updated instantaneously, users experience outcomes instantly. The velocity, with which learning happens and change is implemented, is swift.
3. Additionally, users can speak naturally to applications, as if speaking to another person. They are not limited to the screen sizes, navigation flows, touch and type, and other current limitations for interacting with applications. Voice gives application-owners an unlimited universe of interaction capabilities and functionalities.
4. Moreover, it can be implemented and supported very swiftly, with limited resources. Think low cost and fast results!

At a minimum, Alan Platform is firmly committed to delivering these four benefits to application-owners.

Alan’s superior ability to enable apps to have direct human-like conversations with their users is enhanced by its Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) platform that supports unique terminologies, assists unique workflows, and promotes collective intelligence.

After deploying human-like conversations, in a few days, the Alan AI platform will be in a learning mode as soon as it is released to users. This is just the beginning. As time goes on, the application has the learning capabilities of a smart human being.

The starting gun in the ‘intelligent app race” has already gone off! The race has begun, and Alan is in the lead. The Alan Platform has thousands of developers and is in active conversations with industry segment leaders who see the promise of the technology in creating significant competitive advantages. These firms are in eCommerce, Banking, Telecommunications, Health & Wellness, Field Operations/Operational Efficiency, Customer Service, and Education/Knowledge Transfer.

If your firm and your web presence need a competitive edge, you need to join this race, with a leader who will help you distance yourself from your competition. Visit alan.app today or send me an email at ramu@alan.app.

Ramu Sunkara
CEO of Alan AI

We’ve been hard at work these past few months, adding and updating the most requested features to the Alan Platform. These new product updates will provide ease and efficiency to your day as you create, test, and deploy human-like conversational experiences in your applications.

Here are the updates to get you working faster and smarter in Alan Studio.

Dynamic Entities

According to business needs, voice conversation values (or entities) change over time – for example, daily lunch specials for food apps or favorite clothing items being saved by the user during an online shopping spree. 

To address this need requested you, we’ve added scripting functionality to create ‘adaptive’ voice commands. As a result, the conversational voice dialog can be adjusted to new business needs and provide highly personalized user experiences. The voice conversation values (or entities) capture information from the user’s input like slots at design time. With this feature, you can now update the entities at runtime as well without restarting the dialog session.

Learn more about how to add Dynamic Entities here.

Predefined Callbacks

Alan offers a set of predefined callbacks that you can use to perform necessary tasks and handle significant events in your voice script. 

For example, you can use the callback onCleanupUser when the user disconnects from Alan or the conversation has finished. Here you can perform any cleanup activities or save the user data.

See the full list of callbacks that can be used in Alan here.

Voice Script Flowchart

With this new flowchart, there’s no more need for repeatedly reviewing the dialog flow and tirelessly identifying possible problems in the script code. Instead, you will have a visual representation of the voice script and its workflow – displaying the script blocks as a diagram – so that you can make sure the voice script is robust while writing it.

This flowchart panel will be the bottom right of the code editor and can be enlarged or minimized as you prefer.

Voice Script Import

If you’ve previously exported voice scripts from other voice assistant platforms or worked with them in an external IDE, you can now easily import them into Alan Studio by selecting the file or doing a simple drag-n-drop.

Sample Alan Apps

We are also providing a set of sample starter apps so that you can test and see how Alan’s voice can be integrated with your apps on different platforms: Web, iOS, Android, Flutter, and Ionic.

Check out our repositories in Github and start interacting with Alan right there and then to see how a voice interface for an app can look like. You can also look inside the app files to see the integration specifics.

New Scripts

We’ve added two new example project scripts that you can use, edit, and test to better understand the capabilities of the Alan Platform.

• Hello World – Create your first voice assistant with basic Alan functionality. You will learn how to use:
  • intents and play function;
  • simple patterns and alternatives;
  • User-defined and predefined slots; and
  • Contexts.
• Alan Integrations – Learn how to integrate Alan with your apps on different platforms.
  • Web: JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Ember, Electron
  • iOS: Objective-C, Swift
  • Android: Java, Kotlin
  • Cross-platform: Flutter, Ionic, React Native

We’ve also added some great new features that your app users will enjoy!

Deactivating Alan Button with Voice

You can now give your users a completely hands-free voice experience within your app from the moment they enter through its digital doors to the moment they want to leave. 

By simply saying “Thank you Alan” or “Alan Stop”, Alan can be deactivated and put to sleep until he is needed again. This feature is great for users who are on-the-go or just far enough away from the phone that those few extra steps can be saved for better things. 

Wake Word in the background

Users can now activate Alan even if the app is collapsed in the phone’s background. So while the user is scrolling through their bank statement and realizes that they ordered a nightstand that hasn’t yet arrived from your app, they just need to say “Hey Alan, what’s the status of my order?” and Alan will answer.

You can turn on this feature in Alan Studio on your project’s Integration page by toggling on Wake Word In Background. Currently supported on iOS and Android.

What’s next?

We’ll keep updating the Alan Platform tools and features and make sure that you and your app users have an unforgettable voice experience with Alan. We’re always interested in feedback, so please let us know your thoughts!

In the meantime, see what voice app experiences you can create with the new features mentioned above or check out our Docs for more information and tutorials. For questions or issues, join our Slack channel or email us at support@alan.app. We look forward to seeing what you will create with the Alan Platform!

The Alan AI Team

During the first two weeks of July, Alan AI hosted the World’s first Hackathon for Voice-enabled Applications and we’ve been very impressed by the innovative ideas and the incredible submissions that we’ve seen in this worldwide voice tech event! Today we are thrilled to announce the winners of our first Voice AI Hackathon.

But first. A big thank you from us to everyone for participating!

Before we announce the results, we genuinely appreciate the developers who took part and worked hard for this hackathon. We are excited to see the positive influence and changes that they all contribute to the bettering of our community with these technological innovations. We received submissions ranging from apps providing solutions in the healthcare industry to e-commerce and educational platforms!

Let’s mention the prizes for our Winners!

Top three voice-enabled apps will be awarded:

• 1st place: $500 
• 2nd place: $250 
• 3rd place: $100

With that, congratulations to the winners of the 2020 Alan Voice AI Hackathon!

Our Winners (Drumroll please… )

1st Place: HomeClass

Winner: Naga Raghav Sreeram

The HomeClass project is a community-powered and voice-enabled platform that allows anyone to host and join classes (coding, fitness, dance, yoga,…etc) with voice. HomeClass aims to bring people back together once again through common interests and shared passions in the midst of the pandemic. In order to make a website that is truly accessible to all ages, Raghav wanted to make sure the most vulnerable population in these times, senior citizens and kids, are  able to use it without any issues. Raghav found that Alan Voice AI brings the website one step closer to this goal. By integrating Alan’s unique voice recognition button, the whole website and functionality can be accessible through voice alone. Users can find classes they like, navigate the website, and join a class through voice interactions with the Alan button. 

Congratulations Naga Raghav Sreeram! 

2nd Place: Epley Project

Winner: Nick George-Jones

The Epley Project used Alan to provide vertigo patients voice guidance while completing a standard exercise to relieve their symptoms. COVID-19 led many clinics to cancel appointments for vestibular therapy, and to help address this Nick created a website in March to guide their patients through one of the more common exercises to treat vertigo. While the website on its own was helpful, the patients had to keep the phone in their hand and their eyes focused on the screen. This makes it difficult to complete the exercises correctly, since the head needs to be at certain orientations relative to gravity in order for the exercise to work properly. By enabling the website with Alan, the user can now simply lay their phone down next to them, and rely on the voice guidance to proceed through the exercises. It is coordinated with the website, so the patients can always look at their phone briefly to check their position.

Congratulations Nick George-Jones!

3rd Place: Tales

Team: Narrators

Winners: Krisha Shah, Nisarg Sheth, Aditya Baxi

The Tales project aims to provide educational solutions for children. The Narrators developed a website called Tales, a voice-enabled library to help non-English speaking or visually impaired children listen to stories/fables and learn life lessons. Additional teachings are added at the end of each story discussing the morals, wisdom, courtesy, and knowledge behind the tale. Amazing job! Furthermore, this innovation assists people with sensational disabilities in general with AI assistance as a support to narrate stories/short tales to their kids. 

Congratulations Narrators!

Thank you all so much again for joining us in celebrating these amazing developers and their voice projects! If you joined us in the hackathon and had a great time working with Alan, or are inspired by the innovations you see here, we’d love to see your start your own voice project on Alan Studio. We also would love to get hackathon participant feedback so that we can keep hosting more of these events – making them bigger and better for you!

Looking forward to seeing what you all can build with Alan!

— The Alan Team

Have you ever wanted to develop voice-enabled mobile or web applications?
Well, You’re in the right place!

Alan AI is hosting its first virtual hackathon about Voice AI and inviting developers worldwide to take part! With the Voice AI Hackathon, we are challenging developers (as individuals or teams of 3) to integrate a voice assistant to their new or existing applications or other open-source apps through our conversational voice platform. All you need is basic JavaScript knowledge and the determination to win the TOP PRIZE of $500!

Participants can choose to voice-embed any application — from gaming, social networking, food delivery, or any other industry — the opportunities are endless.

Project submissions are due on July 15, 2020 at 11:59 PM (PST) which can be submitted with a website link, App Store/Play Store link or photo proof of app in the process of being published to App Store/Play Store. Participants will have Alan developers and mentors ready to assist with any questions or concerns throughout your progress. The top three submissions will win a cash prizes and be featured on our Alan platforms.

Ready to sign up? Fill out our sign up form 

Learn more about the hackathon on our official Hackathon Website 

We are excited to see what you build with the Alan Platform!

Alan AI is a Startup Sponsor for VOICE Global 2020 and will be giving a presentation on Multimodal Voice Assistants presented by James Shelburne, Senior Product Manager at Alan.

Learn how Multimodal Voice Assistants are transforming industries with an integrated visual and voice experience — an experience where users can switch between touch and voice. You’ll see how these revolutionary experiences are providing enterprise and consumer value, strategic differentiation, and gain insights on the ROI of voice from our partner use cases.​

Register for free at voicesummit.ai/global and join us on June 17 at 11:00 AM PST on the VG6 channel.

Search for “Multimodal Voice Assistants: a revolutionary experience transforming industries” in the agenda search bar or click here after registering​.

The world is going to change forever post COVID-19. We are preparing Alan for the emerging transformation by enabling Voice in every application.  

In Q1, we’ve significantly improved our product, the Alan Platform, a self-service technology platform within easy reach of every developer using any application platform. With Alan, any developer can add an engaging conversational experience front-end to their app in a matter of hours. 

Our vision is to provide a natural, multi-modal experience between humans and the software they use daily in enterprises. 

In the last quarter, we’ve made significant progress in deploying and partnering with key thought leaders across industries:

1. We saw new industries such as Utilities, Healthcare, and others start to deploy voice experiences in their daily use applications with the Alan Platform.
2. We entered a strategic partnership with SAP Partner Utegration, a full-service SAP consulting and solutions company focused exclusively on utilities with Alan conversational voice experiences for field service processes.
3. We’ve deployed the Alan Platform in the Energy industry at Murphy Oil, and our solution made it to the final round of the SAP Innovation Awards 2020. 

We have also engaged with key partners in the healthcare industry to:

1. Increase patient engagement and triage to enhance the effectiveness of hospital staff during the current COVID-19 pandemic. 
2. Make it easy for post-discharge follow-ups with patients by using a conversational voice experience that reduces the workload of the hospital staff in these trying times. 
3. Provide a conversational voice experience to the provider assessment survey given to patients post-discharge. 

We invite you to lead transformation in your industry with Voice in your Applications today, with the Alan Platform!

The Alan Team

Hello all,

I hope you’ve all been well. In Q1 the Alan Platform progressed with more improved Spoken Language Understanding and faster debugging of your conversational voice scripts. Here is our new video with an overview of the Alan Platform. Below are key updates:

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU)

We’ve upgraded our SLU model performance and handling of accents, noise, and industry-specific terms, including improvements to speech-to-text recognition hints for each context for higher accuracy. The VM Sandbox infrastructure has also been improved and we plan to release usage limits to support Free Plans in Q2 for each Alan Project.

Debugging Conversational Voice Experiences

Now you’re able to filter logs for a given user session and break down the intents, phrases, entities, dialogs, and patterns that were used.

Within Alan Studio, you can now select options to both record user intent as well as get in-app showing where users made a given command.

• To access these options, open the Embed menu and toggle “Take screenshots” and “Record intent audio”.
• Once this data is starting to be recorded, you can view it in the Logs for your Project.
• The new upgraded SDKs give us the ability to record and play user audio input to troubleshoot failed conversations.
• You’ll be able to see screenshots for your iOS and Android app deployments.

Analytics

We’ve vastly improved the analytics which can be viewed directly in your project. This includes the number of interactions, microphone uptime, user sessions, and a map with user locations which can be viewed across different time periods.

Login and Billing

We’ve added Google Login capabilities for convenience. Now, you can log in using your Google Account. In addition to credit cards, you can now pay with PayPal when you sign up or add interactions to your account.

Alan SDKs

All Alan SDKs have been updated to support the functionality mentioned above. If you have not done so already, update your Alan SDKs to use these features!

Alan Playground

We’ve updated the visuals in Alan Playground for iOS and Android and added more sample projects to test. Download from the App Store here or the Google Play Store here.

Documentation

Upgraded documentation significantly with more in-depth guides on Building, Testing, Deploying, and Managing a voice assistant for your application. Take a look at our Getting Started guide here.

For questions or issues, join our Slack channel or email support@alan.app. We look forward to see what you will create with the Alan Platform.

The Alan Team

Co-founder and CEO of Alan Ramu Sunkara, sat down to talk about how Alan and Incture are bringing the world’s first conversational voice experience to field asset management.

Together, Incture and Alan have deployed touchless mobile field asset management in the Energy industry with the Murphy Oil IOP application for Oil Well operations. This solution is now a finalist for the 2020 SAP Innovation Award.

Touchless, Conversational Voice in mobile applications make it easy and safe for employees to enter operations data while on the go. The solution uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to recognize unique terms
and phrases specific to Oil Well operations with Alan’s proprietary Language Understanding Models.

After the introduction of the Conversational Voice User Experience, employees adoption and engagement with their mobile applications increased. This led to an increase in revenue, productivity, and operational effectiveness. As a result of this deployment, Murphy Oil was able to get complete real time visibility into their production operations and make informed business decisions quickly.

Field Asset Management Operations can benefit with hands-free:

• Check-ins when employees start work
• Task management
• Communication to other employees in the field using voice comments
• Onboarding for new employees on proper procedures and protocol
• Training for existing employees on new processes

Learn more about the Incture and Alan Touchless Mobile solution for Murphy Oil here.

We wish you all a happy New Year. As we are on the cusp of the New Year, we would like to thank you for all the conversations with us in 2019. 

In 2019, Alan AI experienced its most significant transition to validate our product, Alan Conversational Voice AI Platform, across multiple industries. Here’s a video of a conversational voice experience in a mission critical field operations application deployed on Alan Platform.  This demonstrates how a Conversational Voice UX provides a hands-free solution for employees to do their daily work, increasing safety, convenience and providing accurate real-time data from the field operations. 

Enterprises and partners developed Conversational Voice UX for existing applications on the Alan Platform in Energy, Public Safety, Healthcare, and Manufacturing industries. This validates our “narrow AI” design for spoken language understanding in these domains and Alan Platform’s capability to support unique voice conversations that are only possible in each enterprise app. We are the leader in providing a context based conversational voice experience across apps.

Here is the link to a new 1 min video on the Alan Platform. You can experience first-hand the conversational voice experiences in our sample apps by downloading Alan Playground from the App Store or Play Store. Alan Platform is differentiated from consumer voice platforms such as Siri, Google, Cortana and Alexa, and platforms like Nuance in the following aspects:

• Alan adds a conversational voice interface to the existing UI of an app
• Alan trains on a small data set to build a domain language model for any app
• Alan leverages the UI and Dialog context for deterministic conversational voice experience in an app
• Alan Studio, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE),that supports JavaScript to build and deploy conversational voice experiences for any business workflow
• Any app (iOS, Android, Web, cross-platform) can be augmented with a conversational voice experience in less than a week 

Today, Alan is the most advanced and complete Conversational Voice AI Platform to build, test, deploy & manage Conversational Voice UX to enterprise apps. In December, the USPTO granted us the patent “Voice Assistant with User Data Context” (10,521,189). 

Our vision is to deploy solutions at every enterprise with an intelligent and engaging conversational voice UX for their daily work apps. It will be a seminal transformation in user experience for enterprise applications. We look forward to working with you to make this vision a reality in 2020. 

Ramu Sunkara, CEO

Every Friday for the month of October we will feature a quick 2 minute tutorial to get you started with the Alan Platform. These videos are designed to quickly get you started using Alan Studio over the weekend at your own pace!

This first video, “Create” is all about creating an account and getting you into Alan Studio! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more!

Missed out on our live webinar? want to see it again? No worries! Every week, we will be releasing our webinars as on-demand videos available on YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date on our latest videos!

In this webinar, we discussed using Alan Studio to integrate the Alan button into a web app and showed how you can easily customize the experience to work for your application!

Today we want to spotlight a video demonstration of a Visual Voice experience for the SAP sample application built using the Alan platform.

Click here for documentation:
https://docs.alan.app/docs/integrations/ios.html

Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrsg0b32nL6L2j5jG7uxOuw

Have you ever wanted to learn more about adding voice to your app but weren’t sure who to ask? Now is the perfect time!

Join us on Thursday, September 19th at 10AM, PST as we walk YOU through Alan and show you how you can add voice to your app in 10 minutes! Chat with Alan Developers and ask questions live!

Sign up today at:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/6115686541869/WN_mnocfxtfTRWc9d7y16z7Rg

We are incredibly excited to share with you a brand new episode of This Week in Voice, where our CEO, Ramu Sunkara sits down with Bradley Metrock to discuss the latest in voice. Thank you to Bradley for having us! Check out the episode below:

https://www.thisweekinvoice.com/s4e3-sep-12-2019

The topics discussed in this episode include:

• CNN: How Government Is Using Siri And Alexa To Stop Spread Of Census Misinformation
• Voicebot.AI Story Of The Week: McDonalds Acquires Voice Startup Apprente To Build Drive-Thrus With Voice Assistants
• Fast Company: Amazon Will Let Anyone Answer Your Alexa Questions Now. Check out A Connect Home’s Alexa setup Guide here.
• The Truly Baffling Case Of The Ancient Voynich Manuscript

From their website: This Week In Voice is VoiceFirst.FM’s weekly news podcast, bringing you the most interesting, relevant stories in the rapidly-growing world of voice technology. If you like what you heard, you can check out more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher Radio, Soundcloud, TuneIn, and many other preferred podcast providers.

The host, Bradley Metrock, is the CEO of Score Publishing, as well as the Executive Producer of Project Voice, the #1 event for voice tech and AI in America, coming the week after CES. Check out projectvoice.ai for more information about the event.

Have you ever wanted to learn more about adding voice to your app but weren’t sure who to ask? Now is the perfect time!

Join us on Thursday, September 12th at 10AM, PST as we walk YOU through Alan and show you how to add a voice interface to your app, as well as answer your questions about development on the Alan Platform.

Sign up here at: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BlMC11eIT_u3MX2bhjyKbA
and get ready to learn more about voice!

With voice technology reaching the mainstream in the consumer world, there’s a new fast-rising startup, Alan, that gives developers and enterprises the ability to add conversational voice interfaces to their existing applications. CEO Ramu Sunkara recently sat down with VoiceFirst.TV at this year’s VoiceSummit event to discuss how voice is entering the enterprise and how Alan is making an impact. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How is Alan different from Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant?

Alan is a complete platform that lets anyone add voice to their application — with Siri, Alexa, and Google, you have to add features in your application to their platform that only works within their apps and devices. With Alan, the application users open the existing application and talk to it. Developers and enterprises have the freedom to add voice to their own applications and leverage all the capabilities. We’re focused on bringing voice to everyday work in enterprise applications and are making headway in field maintenance, retail, finance, public safety, agriculture, and education.

How is voice impacting enterprise today?

Good question. Voice is in its infancy stage in the enterprise, where the use cases are completely from what we’ve seen consumer world. Enterprises just want to do their daily work using voice, and within their existing set of products that are packed with information and workflows that they use to get tasks done. Alan provides a conversational voice experience to these apps that let personnel get the info they need, enter data, and complete workflows — all within the application. 

What’s an example of an enterprise using voice with Alan now?

Now we’re partnered with SAP, one of the largest enterprise software vendors, to deploy solutions in several industries. The first of those is for field maintenance in chemical plants. Employees open the field maintenance application, and have a voice conversation to complete their work commands like “Something’s wrong with this piping”, “What should I do here?”, “What are the open tickets?” as if they were talking to an expert. Alan responds back to diagnose the problem and direct them to the necessary workflow, saying things like “You need to file a ticket”, “Make this work order”. With voice, they get all of this done without having to touch their device. Not only does voice allow them to operate hands-free, but it also gives them an expert with access to their complete enterprise knowledge base and improves the safety for daily operations.

How does this all work?

Alan provides a complete platform that makes it easy for any developer to quickly add voice to their application in a matter of days. We’ve pioneered AI technology that, upon integrating your app with Alan, automatically builds a machine learning model for the application given it’s set of unique terms and product names. 

What’s the grand vision of Alan?

Our vision is to unlock the power of applications with voice & AI. The Alan Platform provides the cloud and machine learning for developers, making it easy to build and deploy voice. Alan’s goal is to democratize voice as the interface for all applications.

Learn more about Alan here.

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   

Alan partners with SAP to usher the Visual Voice experience for enterprise applications. Recently we took SAP Cloud SDK for iOS and integrated Alan with one of the sample applications “SAP Deliveries” in a few steps. Users can now talk to the mobile application using natural voice commands like “Show me all the phones” or “Show me phones that cost less than $500”, etc. without having to touch or type on their devices. Voice responses are synchronized with the visual elements in the SAP Deliveries application. Alan uses Spoken Language Understanding(SLU) for voice (unlike text-based NLP) and leverages any application’s visual and dialog context to provide the next-generation visual voice experiences. You can find more details about the future Visual Voice experience using Alan for SAP applications here.

We attended CentralSquare 2019 and learned the nature of the Public Safety market and the current state of the products.  Central Square Technologies (CST) is the #1 Public Safety player in the US and Canada by the above statistics. We were able to interact with the leaders at CST: Simon Angove (CEO), Jatin Atre (CMO), and Steve Seoane (EVP) to get a pulse on their vision for the future. We also had the ability to interact with some of the 300+ employees of CST,  a few of the 575 Public Safety Agencies and the 1300+ Public Safety Professionals attending the annual event.

The following are some key facts we learned about the daily lives of the First Responders.

• A 1-second decrease in response time translates to saving 10,000 lives.
• Distracted driving is a major cause of the fatalities among First Responders.

The Alan Safety solution was developed as a reference application to integrate with Public Safety CAD deployments from CST and other vendors. Alan Safety brings Voice Interface to first responder applications so that they can interact in a handsfree mode to get all the data a few seconds faster while on the go, thereby decreasing the fatalities and the response time of First Responders.

Alan is delighted to have the opportunity to bring its state-of-the-art Voice Interface to the daily lives of the 2.25M First Responders in the US. We are looking forward to working with Central Square Technologies to further their vision of building safer and smarter communities.  CST was formed by the merger of Tritech, Superion, and Zuercher,  with the investments from Bain Private Equity and Vista Equity Partners. All these companies have pioneered solutions for Public Safety market over the last three decades.

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.

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.

Alan’s 1st trade show – IIT Bay Area Leadership Conference at Santa Clara on June 9, 2018. Alan (named after Alan Turing) adds voice to your application – Web sites, Web and Mobile Applications in your Enterprise. Check us at https://alan.app/blog/

What is the IIT Bay Area Leadership Conference?

The IIT Bay Area Leadership Conference is hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology Bay Area Alumni (IITBAA), a California nonprofit public benefit corporation. IITBAA is focused on the professional development of IIT alumni from all campuses throughout India and the Bay Area in California. Their goal is to educate alumni on new technology trends, markets, and aspiring innovative startups. IITBAA arranges annual conferences on certain subject matters to discuss and network with startups. The conferences allow IIT alumni to be up to date in their workforce and give startups feedback on their ideas and progress.

Who are we?

Alan Studio adds voice to enterprise applications in Web sites, Web and Mobile Applications. Alan is focused on creating a new form of Enterprise Voice AI applications. Integration can be done seamlessly in a few steps and can function in any workflow. Alan uses domain specific language models and contextual understanding that developers are able to take control of voice and create an effective voice commanded workflow that best fits their users’ needs. Get more information about us at https://alan.app/blog/

Yesterday, our CTO, Andrey Ryabov shared our learnings in developing a Neural Network for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) with students at Stanford University. It is part of the AI course on Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Here is a brief on the topics covered.

Spoken language is quite different from the written language in the following ways

1. When speaking, people don’t always follow grammar, use punctuation, and often split their sentences.
2. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) introduces errors.
3. Users tend to use more anaphoras.
4. When writing, a person can go back and edit sentences, but for a speaker, it’s not possible, corrections are appended to the sentence.

These specifics of spoken language have to be considered when developing Natural Language systems. Many classical NLP models trained on datasets of written language don’t perform well on spoken language.

How does one develop a Voice AI Platform that converts speech to the meaning and offers human-like conversations? Here are some tricks we shared on Spoken Language Understanding.

1. Develop Word Vectors for sentences using classical NLP training set.
2. Augment the LSTM to use word positions and context information.
3. Use Attention to make only the important words contribute more.
4. Use Augmented Dataset and Transfer Learning to better train the Neural Network.

The above are some of the Neural Network enhancements we shared and will soon be released in our Alan Platform. If the spoken language understanding problem appeals to you and you are an engineer, email jobs@alan.app to learn more. If you are an enterprise that wants to deploy voice interfaces, please contact us at Alan.

Millions of people still write notes on paper. According to research published by Mueller (Princeton) and Oppenheimer (UCLA) “taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information long term.” But it’s hard to take notes by hand and simultaneously contribute to business discussions.  And most people can only write legibly at the rate or 15-20 words per minute, while spoken communication averages over 110 words per minute.

Trendy journal maker, Moleskine, says the number of young, tech savvy entrepreneurs who use traditional leather-bound journals is on the rise.  They reported sales of over 17 million journals in 2015, and have developed a kind of cult following! While it helps you remember to write things down, finding what you need later in these beautiful journals and note pads can be arduous.

Digital note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote also seem to have a cult-like following. These apps are more than just a digital version of the same fundamental process. And most people can type faster than they can write with a pen on paper. However they have the same basic challenge: You either suffer the distraction of taking notes during the meeting or discussion, or you create notes after the fact.  And you still have to organize the notes manually.

We make some of our most significant contributions to work in the form of conversations with others — using our voice. So, it makes sense to have a digital record of what we say.  But the act of taking notes arguably lessens our effectiveness as participants, and it is still hard to search and find the gems of the conversations.

What if you could have a perfect record of what was said or shared without re-reading and re-listening?  Perhaps blending AI, voice and cloud can change the world of meetings. We think so! Watch for our announcement on September 18. Meetings will never be the same, we promise.

We are excited to announce that Synqq has been selected as a “2017 TiE50 Winner” for the prestigious TiE50 Awards Program recognizing the world’s most innovative tech startups. Winners were announced on Friday, May 5th at the Santa Clara Convention Center during TiE Silicon Valley’s annual tech entrepreneurship conference, TiEcon.

“TiE50 has become a global brand that attracts thousands of companies worldwide. We screened more than 1,303 companies this year and selected the most innovative 50 companies as TiE50 Winners. TiE50 company presentations were well received at the conference. As a not-for-profit, our vigorous screening and judging adopt multiple regression techniques to ensure process integrity,” said program co-chair Daniel Zimmer.

“This highly successful program is in its ninth year and has been a major draw at TiEcon. The TiE50 Program is one of TiE Silicon Valley’s most successful programs,” said Sanjay Shirole, program co-chair. This year, the screening committee included 31 accomplished domain experts and influencers who participated. Our judges included senior executives, venture capitalists, and marquee tech entrepreneurs.”

About TiEcon:

TiEcon is an annual tech entrepreneurship conference put on by TiE Silicon Valley, a not-for-profit organization in its 25^th year. The conference attracts loyal participation from top technology companies, leading venture capital firms, and global service providers. TiEcon 2017 attracted 6,000+ attendees from across the world – including CEOs of established companies to first-time entrepreneurs creating new companies, to leading investment professionals and corporate executives. TiEcon was listed by Worth Magazine as one of the 10 best conferences for ideas and entrepreneurship along with TED and the World Economic Forum.

About TiE:

The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is a non-profit founded in 1992 in the Silicon Valley by a group of successful entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and senior professionals. TiE is a 320,000+ network with 14,000+ members and operates cohesively through 61 chapter locations in 18 countries.