AI company Taiger opens regional Hq in the Lion City

By Digital News Asia June 8, 2015

Eye on Smart Nation, says its technology will humanise all digital interactions
Won HDB tender, to use iConverse virtual assistant which passes the Turing test

AI company Taiger opens regional Hq in the Lion City

MADRID-headquartered ‘knowledge access’ and artificial intelligence (AI) company Taiger has opened its regional headquarters in Singapore, hoping to tap on to the city-state’s Smart Nation initiative.

Taiger provides semantic software, and has a Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform that allows it to build custom semantic search applications for corporations, amongst other solutions.

A key part of Taiger's technology will allow Singapore government agencies and corporations to humanise all digital interactions with users, the company said in a statement.
“Taiger’s technologies and products can greatly contribute to the further advancement of Singaporean society and businesses, by easing public and corporate information access, through the automation of tasks currently in need of human intervention,” said its founder and chief executive officer Dr Sinuhe Arroyo.

“In a recent successful bid for a Housing Development Board (HDB) tender, Taiger’s intuitive intelligent virtual assistant, iConverse, will be trialled for selected business areas. This allows for improvement in customer service, Taiger claimed.” [Edited for accuracy.]

Using AI around semantic and NLP technology, iConverse can understand users’ input, both written and oral, in natural language, conversing with them to help resolve their needs. It will be able to understand all enquiries, no matter how colloquial, and reply as naturally as a call operator would, the company said.

In fact, iConverse is advanced enough to pass the Turing test, where its responses will be indistinguishable from a human’s, within a restricted domain, Taiger claimed.
With five existing patents and five more in process, Taiger said its technology has the power to replace traditional customer support with two-way conversations.

Taiger’s conception goes back to when founder Arroyo, who also has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, enrolled at the Booth Business School (University of Chicago) for his Master of Business Administration (MBA).

With a Booth MBA campus in Singapore, he Arroyo took the opportunity to spend a portion of his programme in the city-state, and Arroyo saw the country as a perfect location to base his South-East Asian operations.

AI company Taiger opens regional Hq in the Lion City “Singapore’s geographical location in South-East Asia, along with its fast-paced efficient business environment, and interest in staying at the forefront of innovation and technological advancements, make it the perfect place for us to establish our regional headquarters” Arroyo (pic) said.

Taiger will be focusing its sales efforts on government sectors, insurance and banking verticals.

Besides HDB, Taiger is currently providing tailor-made services to a number of large multinationals around the world, among them Sony, Vodafone and Banco Santandar.

Arroyo said he sees a huge market opportunity in Singapore due to the availability of engineering talent and capital for its disruptive technology.

With a steady supply of top-notch engineering graduates, Taiger is looking to build a software factory and research lab here, he added.

Taiger said it has raised a seed round of €400,000 (about US$450,000) from angel investors. It is seeking additional funding to create AI technology capable of even faster learning and requiring less customisation, it added.

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