Pioneering voice and conversational AI platform boosts business productivity
Today, most IT vendors don’t have their own voice technology, and this creates cost, pricing and multi-vendor integration issues. The majority of bot services and platforms are highly scripted with little to no natural language processing (NLP) or AI. They aren’t contextually aware. Most platforms aren’t very customisable or they require significant custom programming and professional services by vendors. This limits their extensibility. Complex conversational assistants demand significant ongoing NLP training. Most bot services don’t have an easy way to continuously improve NLP. Large cloud-based platforms like Amazon and Google require all user data to go through a central cloud framework, resulting in privacy and data security challenges and risks. Thanks to the EU-funded OmniBot project, “we’ve introduced Europe to the first-ever voice and conversational AI platform based on proprietary IP enabling businesses to create, customise and integrate advanced conversational chat and voice assistants while maintaining complete control of their data, brands and users,” says project coordinator Jascha Stein, CEO of the eponymous company. The innovation “promises to automate business processes, drive productivity and improve customer experience.” Maximising organisational resources The ecosystem platform supports text, voice, telephony and other communication channels. For companies and original equipment manufacturers, OmniBot “provides an attractive and affordable ownership alternative to current market players,” he notes. “They can build, integrate and manage a complete bot framework one time and then leverage the same framework across many other use cases and communication channels, saving companies considerable time and costs.” The OmniBot platform is designed for large collaborative teams and has many features to help manage and control projects and project teams. It also provides tools for business and IT professionals to plan, design, test and manage bots across company-wide conversational AI applications. OmniBot is one of the most customisable platforms in the industry, and includes application programming interfaces, a software development kit and programing tools optimised for advanced customisation and automation. This allows simple bot dialogues to drive complex client interactions. The bots are built with custom or predefined bot modules. Each bot typically has multiple modules that can also be reused. “The OmniBot solution advances the state of the art in AI technologies,” Stein adds, and facilitates building conversational interfaces into any chatbot or virtual assistant application that uses voice and text. Advanced chatbots and voice-enabled virtual assistants are easily trained. Every bot comes with human-supervised, machine live-learning capabilities, ensuring that the bot learns and improves its contextual understanding very quickly. “This human-in-the-loop machine learning functionality represents an important state-of-the-art innovation.” In contrast to most other solutions, OmniBot bot dialogues are designed through a graphical editor with drag and drop functionality. The dialogues are well structured and easily readable, allowing for an easier path to the addition of more complexity while improving reliability and extensibility. “OmniBot is the first European-based conversational AI platform vendor that owns its own speech technology,” concludes Stein. Europe needs to compete with large voice and conversational AI platform vendors abroad. “We’re on our way to becoming the leading voice and conversational AI platform for Europe.”
Keywords
OmniBot, bot, AI, conversational AI platform, chatbot, NLP, virtual assistant, voice technology, speech technology
