Conversica Honors Alan Turing, Father of Artificial Intelligence, on ‘AI Day’
FOSTER CITY, Calif. (PRWEB) June 22, 2018 -- Silicon Valley-based AI company Conversica is paying homage to the visionary whose ideas helped shape how modern AI works: Alan Turing. Conversica, the leader in conversational AI for business, has declared Turing’s June 23 birthday as “AI Day” in his honor as the company celebrates human-machine conversations with more than 50 million people—the equivalent of reaching 1 in 5 Americans—with its conversational AI software.
“We owe a huge debt to Alan Turing,” said Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica. “Without Turing’s research on ‘Intelligent Machinery,’ artificial intelligence companies like Conversica could not have been imagined. When Turing first described how machines could learn, computers as we know them were in their infancy – using magnetic tape and vacuum tubes. But Turing articulated ideas in 1948 that guide how modern AI works some 70 years later. Without Turing’s vision to shape the future of computer and data science, we would not be benefiting from the tremendous capabilities of AI today and likely my company and countless other successful AI enterprises would not exist. That’s why it’s appropriate that his June 23 birthday be henceforth known as ‘AI Day’ in his honor.”
Making Turing’s Vision a Reality
Decades after Turing developed the Turing Test, Conversica is delivering on his vision by putting conversational AI to work, at scale. Conversica’s AI assistants are used by more than 1,000 companies worldwide to autonomously engage people in conversations with objectives such as qualifying leads for marketers, setting meetings for salespeople, upselling new products to current customers, and collecting payments for finance teams.
The company’s conversational AI capabilities have been significantly enhanced over the past year with the addition of multiple languages, multiple communication channels and new types of conversations.
Conversica has been widely recognized for its AI technology and its rapid growth. The company is a Gartner Cool Vendor and a Red Herring Global 100 award winner, was named to the San Francisco Business Times “Fast 100” and the CB Insights 2018 “AI 100,” and was included in the Inc. 5000 for two years running.
“Turing would be impressed by what we are doing here at Conversica. Our combination of natural language understanding, machine learning, deep learning, and natural language generation is self-evolving, it works exceptionally well, and it’s delivering demonstrable results for our customers,” said Dr. Sid J. Reddy, Chief Scientist at Conversica. “I am still fascinated by the Turing machine that was invented in 1936 but which is still fundamentally relevant as a model of computation and bears close resemblance to many modern artificial intelligence systems. The genius of Turing is a continuing inspiration for the developments in artificial intelligence we are pursuing at Conversica, and I’m proud to see his contribution to the science celebrated as ‘AI Day.’”
Turing: The Father of AI
Born on June 23, 1912, in London, Alan Turing proved in his seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers” that a universal algorithm of determining truth in math cannot exist. During World War II, Turing played a crucial role in Nazi code-breaking.
Turing is widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence, and the test he proposed for gauging the success of AI—the Turing Test—has become an enduring and important concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Laymen will be most familiar with Alan Turing on account of the critically-acclaimed and award-winning biopic of his life, The Imitation Game, which was released in 2014.
About Conversica
Conversica is the leader in conversational AI for business and the only provider of AI-driven lead engagement software for marketing and sales organizations. The flagship Conversica® AI Sales Assistant helps companies find and secure customers more quickly and efficiently by automatically contacting, engaging, qualifying and following up with leads via natural, two-way conversations. Used by more than 1,000 companies worldwide, Conversica’s sales assistants are built on a proven AI platform integrating natural language processing (NLP), natural language generation (NLG), and machine learning (ML) capabilities and engage prospects over multiple communication channels and in multiple languages. Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Conversica is a portfolio company of Providence Equity, Kennet Partners and Toba Capital and is headquartered in Foster City, Calif.
To learn more, visit conversica.com and follow the company on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Sara Black, Bospar, +1 213-618-1501, [email protected]
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