In early August TechCrunch, a popular American online edition about technology and startups, published the news about the young company consisting mostly of NSTU NETI alumni and employees who create future technology. The world's first conversational AI platform which is able to simulate human speech impressed journalists of the leading American publisher. The PR office of NSTU NETI has prepared a translation of this article.
"The New York-based startup has been operating in relative stealth up to now. But it’s breaking cover to talk to TechCrunch — announcing a $2 million seed round, led by RTP Ventures and RTP Global". Artificial intelligence (AI), unlike well-known chatbots, is able to answer unexpected questions, understand the interlocutor in less than 100 milliseconds and simulate the human voice. Dasha remembers the words of the interlocutor and the context of the conversation, and then uses it to build further dialogue. Vladislav Chernyshov (CEO) claims Dasha’s conversation engine is “at least several times better and more complex than [Google] Dialogflow, [Amazon] Lex, [Microsoft] Luis or [IBM] Watson.” None are on a par with what Dasha is being designed to do. “All those [rival engines] were built from scratch with a focus on chatbots — on text,” he says, couching modeling voice conversation “on a human level” as much more complex," he explained to TechCrunch. Artificial intelligence adapts to any function: checking the relevance of applications or surveys, calling clients or job applicants. Depending on the customer's wishes, the authors of the development write the necessary script (name, voice selection, the purpose of the call and other parameters). The artificial intelligence is based on the neural networks which set commands for the bot. According to Dasha AI research results, about 96 % of people who interacted with the voice robot thought they were communicating with a human. Although if you straight out ask Dasha whether it’s a robot, the engineers say it has been programmed to confess to being artificial. “At some point in the future we will be talking to various robots much more than we probably talk to each other — because you will have some kind of human-like robots at your house,” Chernyshov predicts. “Your doctor, gardener, warehouse worker, they all will be robots at some point.”
HSTU NETI graduate Vladislav Chernyshov believes "there will be two or three major AI platforms globally providing businesses with an automated, customizable conversational layer — sweeping away the patchwork of chatbots currently filling in the gap. And, of course, Dasha intends their “Digital Assistant Super Human Alike” to be one of those few."
Dasha’s robocall screener app, which is slated for release in early 2020, will also be spammer-agnostic — in that it’ll be able to handle and divert human salespeople too, as well as robots. By 2022, the developers plan to teach Dasha some new features, such as typing in natural language. Then the next step in 2025 can be an autonomous AI embeddable in any device or a robot.
The company's website says that it prefers engineer-founded companies — that “solve big problems with technology.” “We like technology, not gimmicks,” TechCrubch journalists added.
Dasha’s engineering staff make up more than half (28) its total headcount (48) and include two doctorates of science; three PhDs; five PhD students; and 10 masters of science in computer science.
“More than 16 people, including myself, are ACM ICPC finalists or semi finalists,” he adds — likening the competition to “an Olympic game but for programmers.” A recent hire — chief research scientist, Dr. Alexander Dyakonov — is both a doctor of science, professor and former Kaggle No.1 GrandMaster in machine learning."
Dasha’s five-year+ roadmap includes the eyebrow-raising ambition to evolve the technology to achieve “a general conversational AI.” “This is a science fiction at this point. It’s a general conversational AI, and only at this point you will be able to pass the whole Turing Test,” Chernyshov says of that aim.
Reference:
Dasha is a conversation engine that simulates human speech as close as possible. The technology is based on the scientific work of Vladislav Chernyshov (CEO of Dasha AI, a graduate of Automation and Computer Engineering Department, Novosibirsk State Technical University, NETI and Senior Researcher of scientific-educational center "Electromagnetic Technologies Modeling" at Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Department, NSTU NETI) and Ilya Stupakov (the Chief Software Architect of Dasha AI).
Dasha AI was founded in October 2018. By January 2019, Dasha had made a progress: one million calls (both incoming and outgoing) were performed exclusively by the artificial intelligence without any human intervention. Dasha has more than 20 corporate clients in industries such as banking, health care service and insurance. According to Yakov Novikov, the co-owner of Modulbank, thanks to the robot the bank was able to interview four times more customers in the first month of its work and reduce the call center load.
Founder of Dasha AI Vladislav Chernyshov graduated from Novosibirsk State Technical University in 2008 and now he is the Chief Executive Officer of the company. Co-founder of Dasha AI company Ilya Stupakov graduated from Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Department, NSTU NETI in 2009, he is currently working at the University as a Senior Researcher and is Chief Software Architect of Dasha AI.
The robot is the participant in the program NVIDIA Inception for the elite AI startups. Dasha's mission is to speed up the process of introducing robots into people's lives. The headquarters of the Dasha AI is located in New York and has a R&D office in Novosibirsk.
TechCrunch is the New York branch of RTP. TechCrunch is Internet publisher focusing on technology, startups, Internet business, innovations and web sites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005. The first blog post appeared on June 11, 2005.
