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Interactions Continues Rapid Growth with Five Key Additions to Executive Management Team
[April 23, 2015]

Interactions Continues Rapid Growth with Five Key Additions to Executive Management Team


Interactions, the developer and provider of award-winning natural language understanding technology worldwide, today announced the addition of five new members to its executive team. The expansion will further strengthen the company's research, strategy, marketing and operations during its current period of rapid growth following the 2014 acquisition of the AT&T (News - Alert) Watson? technology and research program.

Best known for its industry-leading customer care virtual assistant solutions, Interactions is expanding its core solutions by developing technology to enable the "Interface of Things," a new generation of speech, touch, and text-enabled interfaces with unprecedented accuracy to interact with virtually any device or service at home, on the road, or in the office.

As a result of this recent growth, the following individuals have joined Interactions' executive team:

  • Jay Wilpon will serve as Interactions' Senior Vice President of Natural Language Research. With more the 150 published papers and patents in speech and natural language research to his name, Wilpon is one of the world's pioneers and a chief evangelist for speech and natural language technologies and services. During his career, he has been a leading innovator for a number of industry-defining voice enabled services, including AT&T's How May I Help You© service - the first nationwide deployment of a true human-like spoken language understanding service.
  • David Thomson (News - Alert) joins Interactions as the Vice President of Speech Research, where he manages Interactions' research and development teams. With more than 30 years of experience developing and bringing to market voice activated systems and devices, Thomson is at the forefront of Interactions' objective to create the most accurate, fastest, and highest quality speech solutions.
  • Ben Stern is joiing Interactions as Vice President of Software Systems R&D. With more than 25 years of experience advancing speech recognition and language understanding technologies, including the development and delivery of the AT&T Watson engine, Stern is tasked with the continued development of the Watson technology and professional services, including packaging, performance tuning, features and enhancements.
  • Mahesh Nair has been promoted to Vice President of Engineering, bringing nearly 20 years of experience designing and developing massively scalable systems in the Internet of Things/Machine to Machine, Interactive Voice Response, Business Process Management, Business-to-Business and financial domains. Respected throughout the technology industry Nair has been a driving force in developing innovative ideas, technologies and processes for Interactions' next generation of offerings.
  • Jane Price has been elevated to the position of Vice President of Marketing. Combining an engineering background with extensive product management and marketing experience, Price has focused her career on helping early stage and disruptive companies succeed. As Vice President of Marketing, Price oversees product and go-to-market strategy, and Interactions' corporate brand and communications.



"These five individuals bring a wealth of natural language, technology and market development experience that has already proven invaluable to Interactions' continued success," said Mike Iacobucci, President and CEO, Interactions. "As demand for Interactions' industry leading natural language understanding solutions further increases, these additions will be vital in our ongoing efforts to drive the development and adoption of the next generation of highly accurate and reliable multimodal devices, applications and services."

With its patented Adaptive-Understanding™ technology, Interactions is the first and only natural language technology provider to seamlessly blend human and artificial intelligence to achieve an unprecedented 95% understanding rate. The company's leading virtual assistant solutions are deployed by customer service-centric organizations such as Hyatt Hotels, Best Western, Humana, TXU Energy, and Asurion (News - Alert), as well as world leading Fortune 500 companies. The development of a true Interface of Things will not only further enhance the customer care experience with the addition of new voice, text and gesture enabled applications, but it will also drive the deployment of a broad spectrum of multimodal interface solutions for smart automobiles, connected homes, and wearable devices.


About Interactions

Interactions, LLC develops and markets award-winning natural language understanding technology used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Built on its patented Adaptive-Understanding™ technology that seamlessly integrates both human and machine intelligence, Interactions provides highly conversational virtual assistant solutions. Companies such as Hyatt, Best Western, Humana, TXU Energy, Asurion and AllConnect deploy Interactions' solutions.

The company's sales, service and support solutions are delivered across any device with type, touch or talk capabilities, and have handled more than one billion transactions to date. Rooted in natural speech recognition and built to adapt to human conversation, Interactions' solutions have delivered cost-savings and increased efficiencies in sales and support for some of the largest companies in the world. Interactions, LLC, founded in 2004, is headquartered in Franklin, Massachusetts and has additional offices located in Indianapolis, Indiana and Austin, Texas.


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