{"id":4530,"date":"2016-06-28T11:09:49","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T15:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=4530"},"modified":"2016-06-28T11:09:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T15:09:50","slug":"destination-cancer-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2016\/06\/destination-cancer-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Conversation Easier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>KITT.AI, a new Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup whose founders include two Whiting School alumni, has landed funding from Founders\u2019 Co-Op, Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund, and Madrona Venture Group.<\/p>\n<p>The company\u2019s mission: to make natural language understanding\u2014conversational interactions with nonhuman intelligences\u2014easily accessible to nonexpert developers.<\/p>\n<p>Company co-founders include Guoguo Chen, MS \u201913, PhD \u201916, an expert in deep learning and speech recognition and creator of the \u201cOK Google\u201d hotword detection prototype for Android, and Xuchen Yao, PhD \u201914, an expert in natural language processing who was formerly an entrepreneur in residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence research institute. The third co-founder is Kenji Sagae, is a past professor of natural language processing at USC and an expert in natural language parsing and dialogue systems.<\/p>\n<p>KITT released its first developer-facing product this spring\u2014a customizable hotword detection engine (https:\/\/snowboy.kitt.ai). A second product, a conversational understanding service, will follow this summer.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2016\/06\/destination-cancer-care\/makingconversationeasier-copy\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-4736\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4736\" src=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/MakingConversationEasier-copy-209x300.jpg\" alt=\"MakingConversationEasier copy\" width=\"209\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/MakingConversationEasier-copy-209x300.jpg 209w, https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/MakingConversationEasier-copy.jpg 432w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 209px) 100vw, 209px\" \/><\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>KITT.AI, a new Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup whose founders include two Whiting School alumni, has landed funding from Founders\u2019 Co-Op, Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund, and Madrona Venture Group. The company\u2019s mission: to make natural language understanding\u2014conversational interactions with nonhuman intelligences\u2014easily accessible to nonexpert developers. Company co-founders include Guoguo Chen, MS \u201913, PhD \u201916, an expert in&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[351,352,353,354,355,356,357,358,359],"class_list":["post-4530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-kitt-ai","tag-alex-fund","tag-amazon","tag-madrona-venture-group","tag-natural-language-processing","tag-guoguo-chen","tag-xuchen-yao","tag-allen-institute-for-artificial-intelligence","tag-kenji-sagae","issue-summer-2016"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Making Conversation Easier - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2016\/06\/destination-cancer-care\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Making Conversation Easier - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"KITT.AI, a new Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup whose founders include two Whiting School alumni, has landed funding from Founders\u2019 Co-Op, Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund, and Madrona Venture Group. 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