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TMCNet:  As Virtual Agents, Virtual Assistants and Chatbots Take Off, eContext's White Paper Explores the Benefits of Structured Knowledge

[July 28, 2016]

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:

  • Correctly understanding the context of questions or requests, as a means of identifying user intent
  • 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.


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