A university spin-out company developing artificial intelligence to enable devices to have long conversations with humans is predicting demand to ramp-up on the back of the coronavirus outbreak.
Alana, which is based at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, said it is already seeing a huge increase in sales of touch-free gadgets which its software can be deployed in.
The technology developed by the firm aims to manage conversations during long interactions, while learning about the user’s interests. This enables it to proactively suggest new and relevant subject matter.
The newly-launched company is now working with clients across a range of sectors including education, healthcare, and finance. It expects higher demand for its technology as touch-free interfaces become more popular in the post-coronavirus era.
The team plans to make further hires this year as it moves into the next phase of commercialisation.
Verena Rieser, director of the Natural Language Processing lab at Heriot-Watt and a co-founder of Alana, said: “Alana is different from the voice-activated assistants on the market today, such as Alexa and Siri, as the software enables long, extended conversations over many turns. Alana achieves this by combining the latest developments in machine learning research with well-established solutions for customer facing interfaces.”
Alana is supported by the enterprise team at Heriot-Watt University, now based at the university’s £19 million Global Research, Innovation and Discovery (GRID) facility which will be officially launched later this year.
Paul Devlin, director of commercialisation at Heriot-Watt University, said: “Alana has developed cutting-edge technology that is targeting a fast-growth global market, something that plays to the strengths of Heriot-Watt and for that reason the company is a great advert for how our Enterprise team at GRID can help take a spin-out company through to the commercialisation stage.”
The conversational technology developed by Alana has been recognised in the Amazon Alexa Prize where it has twice been a finalist.
