[July 28, 2016] |
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As Virtual Agents, Virtual Assistants and Chatbots Take Off, eContext's White Paper Explores the Benefits of Structured Knowledge
eContext
(www.econtext.com),
the world's largest semantic text classification engine, today released
its latest white paper, Enhancing
Virtual Agents with Structured Knowledge, exploring how
Virtual Agent (VA) technology is poised to transform the role of
computers and IT in the economy and society and how deep, broad
taxonomies introduce elements to enhance an already disruptive
technology.
With more than 11,000 "chatbots" built atop Facebook (News - Alert) Messenger and
23,000 developers signed up for their bot framework, bots are positioned
to alter consumers' computing experiences, and industry leaders forecast
continued growth for virtual assistants and bots. Speaking at
Microsoft's (News - Alert) Worldwide Partner Conference in July, CEO Satya Nadella
noted that "chatbots will fundamentally revolutionize how computing is
experienced by everybody ... so pretty much everyone today who is
building applications whether they be mobile apps or desktop apps or
websites will build bots as the new interface." Gartner
prdicts that, by 2019, in at least 25 percent of households in
developed economies, the digital assistants on smartphones and other
devices will serve as the primary interface to connected home services.
To successfully improve business-to-consumer interactions, bots must
either be confined to serve very niche markets or integrate deep
semantic text classification into their platforms to effectively
understand context and provide a positive consumer experience.
"To be truly useful, Virtual Agent technology must employ taxonomies of
structured knowledge alongside natural language intelligence, enabling
more effective and organized communication," said Stephen Scarr,
eContext CEO. "In some cases, niche markets will define the context.
Think of ordering pizza through a chatbot, for example, but any business
employing chatbots to converse across a broad spectrum of topics or
hundreds or thousands of products will need to account for context or
risk offering a deeply flawed user experience."
Virtual Agent technology, which powers today's most advanced virtual
assistants and chatbots, will be a driving force behind the evolution of
information technology over the next decade, because conversation is the
most basic, natural and intuitive mode of social organization. However,
these technologies face several technological challenges as the market
develops, including:
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Correctly understanding the context of questions or requests, as a
means of identifying user intent
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Retrieving the correct answer that fulfills that intent from the most
appropriate knowledge base, source or vendor
Enhancing Virtual Agents with Structured Knowledge explores how
achieving improvements in this area can be accelerated by relying on
deep, broad taxonomies for semantic understanding of user queries and
knowledge processing.
To download the full white paper, visit: https://www.econtext.com/VAWhitepaper.
About eContext
The world's largest semantic text classification engine, eContext
classifies text in real time to any of its 450,000 topic categories
within a hierarchical structure. Powered by a dynamically growing
proprietary knowledge base of over 55 million curated rules and billions
of documents and online consumer interactions, eContext has invested
more than 1 million hours of R&D to date. eContext's 25 verticals cover
all sectors of the consumer digital experience: commerce, chat, social,
news, entertainment, and more. eContext's service accepts inputs from 35
languages and can be used to inject natural-language intelligence into
voice-activated assistants, topically map path-to-purchase and consumer
journey, predict user behavior, classify videos, validate image
recognition, and structure training corpuses. Clients include Ask.com,
Datasift, Kantar Media, and Publicis Groupe. eContext is owned by
metasearch company Info.com.
For more information, visit www.econtext.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160728006353/en/
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