India IT wins ACM Turing Award

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced that the Alan Turing Award for 2011 has been awarded to outsourcing companies in India for successfully passing the Turing Test.

The ACM in a press release said that for the past few years, India companies who have been providing customer support services have been successfully using computers to handle the first level of support, and not a single customer complained that they felt they were talking to a computer.


Using 'text to speech' and 'speech to text' software, advanced machine learning and AI techniques, computers were used to provide first level of support for all calls. A team led by Marvin Minsky, a famous and respected name in Artificial Intelligence, was invited to monitor the entire experiment for the past year, and recommended the Indian outsourcing industry for the award. They said that as little as 1% of the support calls were handled by humans; all issue escalations however were handled by humans. However the entire operation was processor and memory intensive, so to ensure smooth operation, calls were put on hold and music was played at appropriate times to allow memory to be freed at regular intervals.