The Silicon Review - Best Business Review Magazine Super 30 Companies of the Year 2019 | Page 64

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Einav Itamar, CEO & Co-founder
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onversational AI is the holy
grail of artificial intelligence. It
has been a dream of computer
scientists for over 50 years
now. From movies to TV shows,
conversational AI has dominated
popular culture and has captivated
the imagination of almost all
demographics, making us wish we
could actually speak WITH (not AT)
machines. The recent development
of deep neural networks (i.e. deep
learning), allowed Voca.ai founders
Einav Itamar and Dr. Alan Bekker
to finally make that dream a reality,
and in 2017, Voca was born. They
set out on a journey with a mission
to create a human-friendly virtual
agent that by leveraging unique AI
driven, human-like features, will
have the ability to both increase
revenue and dramatically improve
customer satisfaction in call centers
of various types and sizes. Two
years out, they seem to have done it!
AUGUST 2019
h a Per
Scale wit
Dr. Alan Bekker, CTO & Co-founder
Discussing the
Importance of Human
at Scale in today’s Call
and Contact Center with
Einav Itamar, CEO &
Co-founder of Voca.ai.
What made you explore
and step into the call center
industry?
Call centers around the world are
going through massive changes
recently. With over three million
call center agents in the United
States alone, there’s much room for
innovation. On the one hand, people
are always hungry for good service
and they want to use their voice to
get that service since voice is the
fastest and most efficient way to
communicate. On the other hand,
companies keep trying to reduce
operating expenses by driving
Einav Itamar, CEO &
Co-founder, and Dr. Alan
Bekker, CTO & Co-founder
During the last 15 years, Einav
has led several AI and Big Data
tech startups. Before he co-
founded Voca.ai, he was leading
the adoption of deep learning
technologies at eBay. Prior
to that, Einav led the R&D of
two AI startups, one of them,
Corrigon, was acquired by eBay.
Corrigon developed a deep-
learning based technology for
image recognition. Artificial
intelligence was also the subject
of his master research at the
Technion University, one of the
leading technology universities in
the world. Following Corrigon’s
acquisition, Einav met Dr. Alan
Bekker – a leading deep learning
and AI researcher that had the
same passion to Conversational
AI like himself. Together they
co-founded Voca. Alan is an
author of 10 papers in leading AI
journals and conferences. Prior
to starting his PhD, Alan has
been working as a machine
learning researcher in Intel.
Recently (2019) he was named
as one of Forbes 30 under 30.
people away from the voice channel
to cheaper, less engaging alternative
channels such as e-mail, chat and
online forms. This frustrates the
user and ultimately alienates him/
her. So our message to the world is
that you should stop compromising.
Our AI platform was built from
the ground up to mimic human
behavior. So a customer that is
speaking with a Voca agent is able
to express him or herself in the
most natural way possible, human
conversation. Our AI listens to that