Chatbots.org Business News

Don’t you wish your car was as intuitive to use as a smartphone?During the past decade, automotive manufacturers have added more and more electronics to take the hard work out of driving a car. But the proliferation of buttons, screens and lights, while reducing the physical effort required to drive a car, has also increased the risk of distractions.

Building a closer relationship with individual customers is now a key objective for many organizations. However, those customers are already one step ahead. A decade of overexposure to increasingly aggressive marketing tactics has made them understand the power they wield over businesses that want their data and wary of trusting brands. Instead of engaging directly with an organization users choose to connect with friends, and even strangers, online to crowd source opinion on purchasing decisions. But surprisingly, treat them right and they are still willing to share.

Trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

Every day, the social web grows in size and influence with consumers. Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, which means millions of opportunities for companies to promote their products and gauge market trends.

But trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

English makes up only about 40 percent of global social media postings, so companies that ignore this language diversity are at greater risk of being caught off-guard by trends or developments that could impact their business.

Now that Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, is well know to the world, users are starting to ask themselves what to do with this technology and what’s the next step.

Traditionally, virtual assistants have typically resided on a company website to help customers find the answers to their queries, but with corporate intranets becoming increasingly complex, more organizations are turning their attention to use VAs to resolve internal queries too. The corporate intranet has changed considerably from the early days of just publishing information. In the last few years as collaboration technologies have taken hold intranets have become a mine of information not just for employee related issues such as human resources, but with knowledge bases such as wikis too. However, having a large resource of data, doesn’t guarantee that a user can find the answer they are looking for.

It’s just over two week since we finished at Mobile World Congress and I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the conversations I had with people that dropped by for a chat at our two exhibition stands – one located in the main section of Hall 2, the other in App Planet. There was certainly a healthy level of interest in how virtual assistants can be used on mobile devices – maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise following Apple’s launch of Siri but it was really encouraging that so many people are recognizing the opportunity of using NLI as the basis of a new and effective speech enabled interface for mobile devices.

On November 1, 2011 I gave a talk to Google on natural language processing, including chatbot technology and issues in understanding simple English sentences for a story-game demo which tries to act out the sentences. Download the PDF or read full text below.

Fresh Perspectives

I am an AI research engineer. I want to create things that people use, but that stretch the boundaries of the possible. Whatever I work on, I research it and then try to come at it with a fresh perspective. A fresh perspective is something Google and I have in common, though we approach things from opposite directions. Typically my fresh perspectives involve understanding a domain and then writing a new application-specific scripting language to encapsulate insights I have gleaned. Google’s perspectives come from access to massive amounts of data and hardware.

I research everything. I even researched how to give this talk. I thought about making a lot of clever PowerPoint slides. Then I read up on using and abusing PowerPoint. I abandoned that plan.

First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.

For companies trying to win corporate and consumer adoption of their own NLP technologies, this is a long-awaited moment. And one of the firms that thinks 2012 could be the year this market really takes off is VirtuOz VirtuOz, Inc., a Paris-born company that moved its headquarters to Emeryville, CA, in 2009.

In a recent release Gartner predicted its top ten disruptive technologies for 2012. Amongst the expected and rather predictable media tablets, app stores and cloud computing, Gartner says that icons, menus and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces such as gesture, voice and search. But voice isn’t everything. For it to be a successful method of interaction, voice needs an underlying intelligence.

The goal of psychology is to predict and control behavior. It is the same goal we have as knowledge engineers. This may sound somewhat Orwellian, but it is not about sinister machinations. In Artificial Solutions, we want to do everything possible to help users of our Teneo virtual assistants (VAs) quickly and conveniently find the way to the information they need. Since a VA is typically designed to answer a specific set of queries, we have a clear idea of which content should be covered. For example, it’s reasonable to expect that a VA on a bank’s website will be asked questions about banking, hence it will need to be an expert on transactions such as opening accounts and transferring money, but it is not reasonable to expect it to advise you which sofa to buy with the check you write. Anna knows every item that IKEA sells, but will be puzzled if you try to borrow money from her.