Type Private company Headquarters Barcelona, Spain | Founded (2001) | |
Industry Computer Software, Natural language, Intelligent software assistant, Founder Johan Åhlund, Johan Gustavsson and Michael Söderström Number of locations Offices worldwide with R&D centers in Barcelona, Hamburg, London, Mountain View, Milan, Utrecht and Stockholm | ||
Artificial Solutions is a multinational software company that develops and sells natural language interaction products for enterprise and consumer use. The company's natural language solutions have been deployed in a wide range of industries including finance, telecoms, the public sector, retail and travel.
History
Artificial Solutions was founded in Stockholm in 2001 by friends Johan Åhlund, Johan Gustavsson and Michael Söderström to create interactive web assistants using a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Though Åhlund initially took some persuading, he thought it sounded ridiculous to be talking to a virtual agent on the internet.
The company expanded with the development of online customer service optimization products and by 2005 it had several offices throughout Europe supporting the development and sales of its online virtual assistants. Artificial Solutions was placed as visionary in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service Applications.
In 2006 Artificial Solutions acquired Kiwilogic, a German software house creating its own virtual assistants. Elbot, Artificial Solutions’ test-bed to explore the psychology of human-machine communication, won the Loebner Prize in 2008 and is the closest contestant of the annual competition based on the Turing Test to reach the 30% threshold by fooling 25% of the human judges.
With a change in management in 2010 the company started to focus the basis of its technology on Natural Language Interaction and launched the Teneo Platform, which allows people to hold humanlike, intelligent conversations with applications and services running on electronic devices. In 2013 Artificial Solutions launched Indigo, a mobile personal assistant that is able to operate and remember the context of the conversation across different platforms and operating systems. A new round of funding was announced in June 2013. The $9.4m will be used to support expansion in the US market.
In February 2014 Artificial Solutions announced the Teneo Network of Knowledge, a patented intelligent framework that enables users to interact using natural language with private, shared and public ecosystem of devices, also known as the Internet of Things.