Kitt.ai can add voice controls to devices

What: Kitt.ai, a Seattle software company specializing in natural language understanding as related to artificial intelligence Ph.D.'s galore: The three co-founders, Yao, Guoguo Chen and Kenji Sagae, all have doctorates in computer-engineering related fields. Yao and Chen studied at Johns Hopkins and Sagae at Carnegie Mellon. The idea: Yao came up with the idea for the company while at Johns Hopkins. He flew to Seattle to interview at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and told Allen CEO Oren Etzioni he wanted to start his own company. AI2 agreed to incubate the startup, and Kitt.ai was formed.