Speaktoit

Speaktoit
Privately held
Industry Natural language user interface
Founded Arlington, Virginia, US (2010)
Headquarters Palo Alto, California, US
Key people
Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO
Artem Goncharuk, CTO
Pavel Sirotin, VP Knowledge and Interaction Design
Products Assistant, api.ai
Website www.speaktoit.com

Speaktoit is a developer of human–computer interaction technologies based on natural language conversations. The company is best known for creating the Assistant (by Speaktoit), a virtual buddy for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone smartphones that performs tasks and answers users' question in a natural language.[1] Speaktoit has also created a natural language processing engine that incorporates conversation context like dialogue history, location and user preferences.

In May 2012, Speaktoit received a venture round (funding terms undisclosed) from Intel Capital.[2] In July 2014, Speaktoit closed their Series B funding led by Motorola Solutions Venture Capital with participation from new investor Plug and Play Ventures and existing backers Intel Capital and Alpine Technology Fund.[3]

Api.ai

In September 2014, Speaktoit released api.ai (the voice-enabling engine that powers Assistant) to third-party developers, allowing the addition of voice interfaces to apps based on Android, iOS, HTML5, and Cordova. [4][5] The SDK's contain voice recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech. api.ai offers a web interface to build and test conversation scenarios. The platform is based on the natural language processing engine built by Speaktoit for its Assistant application.[6] Api.ai allows Internet of Things developers to include natural language voice interfaces in their products.[7]

References