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Sight and sound are central to how we perceive the world. Although these senses are closely intertwined in governing the human expressions, voice, for long, didn’t materialize as a major interface with machines. But today, Voice technology sits at the cusp of a revolution.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) today has taken deep root in everyday lives, voice technology an important discipline in AI is evolving steadily. The traditional techno-etiquette of greeting “Hello” in a telephonic conversation has now given way to a new set of salutations like “Hello Alexa”, “Ok Google” and “Hey Siri”, marking a drastic evolution of speech recognition from insignificance to mainstream. While the world’s technology giants are clamoring for a vital market share in the voice-first ecosystem to provide consumers with a hands-free way to get information, voice utilization in businesses seems to be much slower. A crucial aspect that is restricting this adoption of voice technology in businesses is the fact that the consumer voice assistants do not preserve the existing visual experience and context of a conversation to complete business workflows. For a voice assistant to be effective in an enterprise, the ability to have a multi-turn and contextual dialogue to complete business workflows is necessary. Another challenge with the existing voice assistants is that they fail to adapt to the unique linguistic expressions of a given enterprise.

Enter Alan. Nestled in one of the major cities that make up Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale, Alan is the world’s first voice AI service for enterprises specially designed to deliver improved business standard capabilities and advanced voice experience. Having recognized voice technology as the way of the future, Alan is capturing the corporate imagination pertaining to voice assistants.

Our vision of the future is that every application will have a voice interface with a button called Alan

Unlocking the potential of the voice interface, Alan is creating ripples in the marketplace by providing both voice and visual responses within mobile and web apps—with nearly instant integration.

It’s All in the Voice and Visuals

At the core, Alan’s foundation is based on the Recurrent Neural Networks technology, a type of artificial neural network with loops in them that allow information to persist, with a unique blend of domain language model. According to Alan’s Co-founder and CEO RamuSunkara, “Alan can accurately derive the text out of a voice stream, process the intent, execute the complete business logic, and stream back the coordinated voice and visual responses—all within 100 milliseconds.”

Traditional solutions fail to capture voice within existing UI, leverage the application visual interface, and understand the language of users and data. Moreover, it’s a time consuming and cumbersome process to train the Domain Language Model due to the lower iteration speeds. Alan outperforms these traditional solutions with its ability to seamlessly leverage any existing UI, offering efficient voice control for the complete application while integrating almost instantly.

Alongside voice, Alan also allows its users to consume information with visuals. With what they call Alan Tutor, the company enables businesses to integrate a custom voice interface suited to their applications. Alan SDK provides an easy way to add voice interface to existing mobile and web applications in minutes. It works with three simple steps, which include writing conversational experiences in JavaScript, adding SDK to the existing application and then simply start using the voice access capability. The SDK even works well with iOS platforms using minimal script codes. “With our custom domain language model and dynamic learning, Alan does not need any pre-training to learn the vocabulary of a specific domain and is ready for use immediately.

We make it super simple and instant for people to add voice capability to any application,” notes Gaurav Kuchhal, Chief Product Officer, Alan. It can fully integrate with all layers of an application—from data and language layer to workflows and UI.

"We make it super simple and instant for people to add voice capability to any application"

What places Alan a cut above Google DialogFlow, Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa Skills is its full integration, flexibility, faster iteration, and cross-platform functionalities. Alan’s instant one-shot learning capability, intents combined with business logic, and ability to merge formal logic in the script and machine learning for deterministic conversation logic makes it ready to use with no pre-training.

The Future of Voice

The name Alan is inspired by the legendary computer scientist, Alan Turing, who challenged the world in 1950 by posing a question “Can machines think?”. Today, with a dynamic and well-built team of AI experts, Alan’s ultimate goal is to add intelligent natural voice recognition capabilities to all applications and enhance the ability of both the user and the application.

The company’s future roadmap is not just limited to business applications but also focuses on revolutionizing the way every person interacts with their phones and websites. Company’s goal is to integrate Alan into every single application -- mobile or web. This will enable people to use voice to control any application. “Our vision of the future is that every application will have a voice interface with a button called Alan. Voice is the future interface to every application just like how touch interface dominates the market today. We envision being the future of voice assistance,” concludes Kuchhal, CPO.