What Is AI Engine and Do I Need It?

sasha uritsky

Mar 29, 2018

Chatbots and assistant programs designed to support conversations with human users rely on natural language processing (NLP). This is a field of scientific research that aims at making computers understand the meaning of sentences in natural language. The algorithms developed by NLP researchers helped power first generation of virtual assistants such as Siri or Cortana. Now the same algorithms are made available to the developer community to help companies build their own specialized virtual assistants. Industry products that offer NLP capabilities based on these algorithms are often called AI engines.

The most powerful and advanced AI engines currently available on the market are (in no particular order): IBM Watson, Google DialogFlow, Microsoft LUIS, Amazon Lex.

All these engines use intents and entities as primary pnguistic identifies to convey the meaning of incoming sentences. All of them offer conversation flow capability. In other words, intents and entities help to understand what the incoming sentence is about. Once the incoming sentence is correctly identified you can use the engine to provide a reply. You can repeat these two steps a large number of times, thus creating a conversation, or dialog.

In terms of language processing ability and simplicity of user experience IBM Watson and Google DialogFlow are currently above the pack. Microsoft LUIS is okay too; still, keeping in mind that Microsoft are aggressively territorial and like when users stay within their ecosystem, it is most efficient to use LUIS together with other Microsoft products such as MS Bot Framework.

Using AI engine conversation flow to create dialogs makes building conversations a simple, almost intuitive, task, with no coding involved. On the flip side, using AI engine conversation flow limits your natural tendency to make conversations natural. The alternative, delegating the conversation flow to the business layer of your chatbot, adds richness and flexibility to your dialog but makes the process more comppcated as it now requires coding. Cannot sell a cow and drink the milk at the same time, can you?

Amazon Lex lacks the semantic sophistication of their competitors. One can say (somewhat metaphorically) that IBM Watson was created by linguists and computer scientists while Amazon Lex was created by sales people. As a product it is well packaged and initially looks pleasing on the eye, but once you start digging deeper you notice the limitations. Also, Amazon traditionally excelled in voice recognition component (Amazon Alexa) and not necessarily in actual language processing.

The space of conversational AI is fluid and changes happen rapidly. The existing products are evolving continuously and a new generation of AI engines is in the process of being developed.

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nmodes Is Helping Businesses to Succeed

With the launch of the new dashboard nmodes is helping businesses to drive traffic and grow sales.

For example, One of our clients needed to increase traffic to their website while at the same time improve the conversion rate. In other words, they wanted to see more quality traffic.

The client made a concentrated effort on social media, however they were having difficulties in finding the target audience - traditional keywords search resulted in too much noise and did not produce desired outcome.

nmodes dashboard simplified this client’s engagement process. We created a dedicated stream that accurately addressed their targeted audience. nmodes dashboard is actionable, so their engagement became easy. nmodes technology identifies potential customers accurately, and so their engagement became efficient.

As a result, the click thru rate rose up to 65%, traffic quality improved by 25%, and conversion increased to 6-8%

Another client relied heavily on mainstream dashboards (such as Hootsuite) These tools do not do a good job finding relevant conversations, in the process producing too much noise and forcing client’s community managers to spend long hours manually identifying these relevant conversations. The client manages multiple social account and this type of manual labour was impeding the business, both in terms of costs and efficiency.

nmodes produces highly accurate results in finding relevant conversations that do not require manual clean up. The client started using nmodes solution, and immediately freed a substantial amount of hours which enabled them to consecrate on servicing their customers and acquiring new ones.

The Advantage of Social Engagement for Business, in Simple Words

Much is being said about social networks and their importance for businesses. The amount of analysis, explanations, and advice keeps on growing, while the matter is being investigated from every possible angle, real and imaginary.

As for me, the need for businesses to market and sell on social can be explained by a simple argument.

Here it is.

The principle advantage of social networks for a business over other mediums is in the social networks’ potential to build trust. Traditional marketing mediums, such as TV, newspapers, internet, radio, etc. are not designed to build trust. They are information channels, or scaling vehicles, or sales means, but their primary goal is not to build trust. Social networks, on the other hand, are exactly this - a trust building tools.

And herein lies their biggest advantage in today’s market. The endless variety of options consumers have and the ever growing dissatisfaction with traditional aggressive marketing methods, such as commercials or banners, means that creating trust between businesses and their audiences is now the most efficient way to attract customers. The way that guarantees long-term sustainability and growth.

This is, simply put, the reason for businesses to embrace the social.