PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pat Inc., the leader in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), today launched into private beta with $2.5 million in seed funding. Its breakthrough in NLU applies to machine reading and speech comprehension, which is a fundamentally unsolved problem in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Machines cannot have a meaningful conversation. Starting today, Pat’s API for enabling NLU is now available to select partners for enabling natural conversations between consumers and machines.
A simple example is if a consumer asks: “Hey Siri, call Beth, no, actually, John.” Pat is the only solution in the market today that understands the meaning in context and will match the request to “call John.”
Wibe Wagemans, CEO of Pat Inc., said: “To have a meaningful conversation with machines is only possible when we match every word to the correct meaning based on the meanings of the other words in the sentence - just like a 3-year-old does without guesswork. Pat has made that radical breakthrough with certainty instead of probability, and can now scale the blue ocean of uncontested A.I. market space in human-machine conversation.”
Professor Robert Van Valin, Jr., CSO of Pat Inc., said: “The approach by the Pat team with NLU works because it’s based in linguistics, and successfully incorporates meaning into the processing of natural language. This has historically been the biggest challenge of the industry. For instance, E.M. Jellinek famously said ‘Every time I fire a linguist, performance goes up.’ The A.I. industry gave up far too soon on linguistics, which is where the answer was all along. Pat has made a major breakthrough in NLU, which has the potential to revolutionize the field.”
According to research firm IDC, A.I. platforms such as Apple Siri, Google Tensorflow, Facebook M, Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson and Microsoft Cortana will generate about $1.4 billion in revenue in 2016. Additionally, by 2020, IDC predicts the market for A.I. applications will reach $40 billion. Pat excels over the current competitive landscape in speed, accuracy, scalability of computing and languages, conversation, and multi-lingual capabilities. Its first API in the market adds meaning to NLU products driving better conversation.
John Ball, CTO and founder of Pat Inc., said: “The solution to NLU is, first, the linking of any language to an underlying meaning with the RRG Model and, second, the automation on machines with a highly scalable patented neural network. We have solutions for Word Sense Disambiguation, Context Tracking, Machine Translation, and Word Boundary Identification. Five professors joined the Scientific Advisory Board upon seeing the conversational ability of Pat, further validating our approach and breakthrough in NLU.”
For more information on Pat, visit www.pat.ai.
About Pat Inc.
Founded in 2015, Pat is the leading meaning as a service provider for all A.I. text- and voice-based applications in the market. Focused on its bold vision to humanize conversation with machines, Pat made the biggest breakthrough in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) by integrating the RRG (Role and Reference Grammar) Model with a highly scalable, patented neural network. Parsing straight-to-meaning results in the accurate intent in human language. In 2016, the company launched an API in private beta that adds meaning to A.I. products in multiple languages. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California with R&D facilities in Sydney, Australia, Pat is privately owned. For more information about Pat, the meaning matcher, visit www.pat.ai.
