In 1950, Alan Turing asked the question, “Can computers think?”
To answer that question, this innovative British mathematician established the notable Turing Test to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, a human. Also known as Artificial Intelligence.
Over half a century later, the computing industry has advanced greatly and solely because of Turing’s research and discoveries. A couple notable advancements in most recent years are Cloud computing, providing access to on-demand data centers for many users over the internet, and the advancements in Neural Networks, improving speech to text accuracy to 96%. Because of Alan Turing, we have been able to enter our current era of Voice.
Consumer giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon have taken these innovations and created a comfortable user experience for their consumers by adding voice AI on their phones, at their home with smart speakers as well as in their cars. It is estimated that by 2021, 1.8 billion people will be using a voice assistant in their daily lives. That’s 10% of the world in just five years.
However, Voice is not just for entertainment or searching capabilities, all enterprises will greatly benefit from adding a voice interface for their customers as well as employees. Today, some enterprises think that voice strategy means building skills for Alexa or actions for Google Assistant. However, we believe that enterprise voice strategy needs to go beyond smart speakers or assistant products and adopt voice just like they adopted Mobile and SaaS. Enterprises need to provide voice interfaces wherever customers and employees are interacting — on their websites and mobile apps.
As you define your voice strategy, you need to ask three key questions:
- How well does it understand my enterprise language?
- How well does it integrate within the context of my application?
- How will it improve and reduce friction over time for my employees and customers?
The future of enterprises will involve both employees and customers getting things done through voice conversations. We believe that if we make it easy to deploy voice and manage the voice interface, that enterprises of all types will finally be able to deploy voice in their interactions with customers and employees. Now is the time to launch an independent voice AI service that will pass the Turing Test and be an integral part of every enterprise. To honor the forward thinking of the great visionary Alan Turing and to materialize his vision, we decided to name our service as Alan.