Business news

Statens Vegvesen, which translates as the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) is an autonomous agency within the State’s Ministry of Transport and Communication. Responsible for the planning, construction and operation of the national and county road networks, NPRA is also in charge of vehicle inspections, driver training
and licensing.

NPRA was struggling to manage an increasing volume of calls, coupled with restrictive public opening hours. The obvious solution was to move some of the routine queries to the website and relieve the pressure on the advisors employed in its seventy-two Traffic Stations, enabling them to concentrate on more complex enquiries.

Artificial Solutions’ strong Nordics presence and native Norwegian-speaking staff were a key decision-making factor for NPRA, and Trude Gjerstad Strand, Project Leader and Senior Advisor, set about developing a pilot that would concentrate initially on vehicle registrations, ensuring that the public had the right level of documentation before visiting NPRA offices in person to complete the process. NPRA chose to implement the pilot project in-house, in partnership with Artificial Solutions.

Artificial Solutions, the natural language interaction (NLI) specialist that enables users to have a meaningful, humanlike interaction with technology, announced today that it has been shortlisted for the Most Innovative Product of the Year in the FSTECH Awards. Run by Financial Sector Technology, one of the leading business titles for IT decision makers in the UK and EMEA financial services, FSTECH Awards recognizes excellence and innovation in information technology in the sector.

Recently Creative Virtual Ltd was shortlisted for the Econsultancy Innovation Awards 2012 in the category of ‘Innovation in Customer & User Experience’ for their integration of O2 UK’s virtual agent Ask Lucy with Live Chat from LivePerson via a seamless handover process. Each year the Econsultancy Innovation Awards recognise the finest creative thinking, ideas and implementations that are changing the landscape of the digital industry. This year more than 450 companies submitted entries, and around 150 have been shortlisted across the 19 categories. The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in London on 23 February 2012.

Virgin Media is the United Kingdom’s leading entertainment and communications company—the first to offer consumers broadband, digital TV, phone and mobile from one company.  Today Virgin Media is the largest Virgin branded company in the world, with almost 13,000 employees and ten million customers across the UK.

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (intelligent virtual agents) for online marketing, sales, and support, today announced that Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, has extended the mission of Lena, its VirtuOz IVA, to online sales. By integrating Lena into its online retail operation, Kaspersky Lab can now provide personalized sales assistance to customers 24/7.

Life is much too serious and we all need more laughter in our lives.

Now that we are starting off fresh in the New Year it’s a good time to bring out your best – your sense of humor combined with your love of new technology.

Speech Technology Group cordially invites you to enter our speech humor contest.

Here is how it work’s – it’s easy:

The best submissions received by January 27th will be posted at http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com

The winner will be announced on February 3rd and gets a Kindle Fire.

Are you game?

For a quick sample to get your juices flowing and to sign up, do to http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-humor

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.

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online marketing, sales, and support, today announced that it processed a record 166 million conversations in 2011 on behalf of its customers.  This growth was fueled, in part, by expansion of VirtuOz’ client base across multiple verticals including high tech, telecommunications, retail, and consumer packaged goods.  In addition, the company noted the expansion of IVA usage from customer service, to sales and marketing via a growing number of touch points, including mobile phones and social media, such as Facebook.

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.