Alabot…AI & NLP enabled automated interactive agent for your portal
Alabot is a very interesting product idea. It is a bot (a bot is a piece of computer code) that has artificial intelligence (AI) & natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Positioned as an ‘Interactive Intelligent Agent’ it has been ported to instant messengers (mobile/web) and can act as an automated chat application with AI & search/retrieval capabilities. So you can have Alabot as an unmanned IM/chat application on your website to answer simple user queries. Alabot is a product from Xanadutec (a UK & India based company with exposure to BPO, transcription, document mgmt); it has been built up from scratch and is an original product idea (as claimed by them). They are in the process of rolling it out for some initial clients- a travel portal, an e-commerce site and an intelligent SMS based service. Monetization will be based on the specifics of the vertical e.g. for the travel portal, it would be based on a per unique conversation charge. Alabot is currently not for public use; it has been ported to Gtalk for testing- yahoo plugs and jabber plugs are also on the way. Stock quotes / news / location based queries are planned to be built into the bot engine once it goes live.
So how does this work? Actually just like your regular IM, save the fact that it is automated. Check out the screenshot for a demo conversation of a user chatting with Alabot on a job portal while looking for a job. Alabot weaves in AI, NLP & search into its user interactions. I added it to my Gtalk client and tried it out. The result looked robust for a start, though its obvious that intelligence based systems will approach optimal performance only once they have gathered large data sets from actual usage. Alabot could have applications in various online portals for frontend/customer (first point of contact) interactions. And my hunch is that this probably makes more sense for overseas markets that India because of their higher labor/wage rates, making unmanned solutions highly cost-advantageous.
Nilesh Trivedi on Sep 7, 2007
Original product idea? Give me a break ! How long has A.L.I.C.E been around? NLP & AI has seen years of research and there are dozens of companies providing this kind of bots for websites/support (sales and after-sales) and so on. Heck, there are even bots that can teach you AI concepts !
Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chatterbots
Useful idea? Definitelyit is but original ? Hardly.
cheers
nilesh
amit on Sep 7, 2007
Nilesh,
Thanks for pointing out that this is not exactly a new idea. This is what the company claimed; its possible that the idea itself is not original but its specific implementation may have a novel twist.
Can somebody from Alabot answer this question and clarify this?
amit
Nilesh Trivedi on Sep 7, 2007
The thing is, most of this research (algorithms and tools) is public-funded and available in the public domain. The domain-specialized bots, such as Alabot which can converse about few specific topics, are a done thing. It’s the general purpose AI that is proving elusive. No bot has yet passed the Turing test. Read this very entertaining article on how two chatbots interact with each other.
ALICE AI Foundation is one of the most prominent organizations in this field. Around 2003, I wrote a bot to answer the queries of IIT KGP aspirants using their tools, . And I’m not even a comp. science guy
My current pet project involves speech-based interaction and not text. Phones have a higher penetration than IM any day. Moreover, with AI, it is important to set the customer expectations right. It’s better to let them know that they are interacting with bots instead of trying to simulate a perfectly natural conversation.
amit on Sep 7, 2007
Nilesh,
I don’t quite agree with you there; academic endeavours are great but they need to be proven in the real world. Without that they are just that- of academic interest, devoid of real world relevance unless proven otherwise. You can have the most brilliant of academic stuff that is utterly useless from a practical perpective. This is the world of business and business runs on proven ideas.
amit
akshat on Sep 9, 2007
Hi Nilesh
I am from the Alabot team and have been funding this idea since its inception.
You are absolutely right about ALICE etc which are out there and have been there for a while. The work done by the AI foundation has been very forward thinking indeed but they have not been built as enterprise applications but as research projects.
Alabot has tried to take the idea towards a more productive and user friendly path. It has been made ground up for a business environment with capabilities to hook into existing databases and applications - SAP, CRM etc. - data can be sent via sms, mobile clients, IM, web etc - so its really upto the client to decide which technology suits them.
Ala also allows companies to port their application to any IM and a mobile cliet (Alatalk), SMS with NLP.
I appreciate your comments though - keeps us on our feet!!!
Akshat
Jay on Sep 9, 2007
Original AI - No. Original product idea - sure.
When ALICE happened there was no IM - no BPO. Maybe the Alabot folks are fine with their original product idea twist as long as somewhere in the credits ALICE is listed - for inspiration.
Incidentally (and I may be wrong) most product ideas are interpretations of existing concepts.The key words being product and concept.
Nilesh Trivedi on Sep 9, 2007
Hi Akshat,
My second comment was not a criticism of Alabot or in supporte of my assertion in the first comment at all. If you read it independently of the first comment, then it would be clear that I was just sharing some information on the underlying technologies. Sorry for the confusion there.
Alabot is a definitely useful product. Integration with existing databases, SAP and CRM etc., which the article didn’t mention, would be non-trivial and with support for Indian languages, I can see quite a few portals making use of it. All the best
cheers
nilesh
i2ifactory on Sep 14, 2007
Original idea ? there have companies like http://www.creativevirtual.com/, http://www.liveperson.com/ and others using this concept for CRM, ERP and other enterprise uses.
Gaurav on Oct 12, 2007
Hi this is Gaurav , Chief Architect of Alabot , I want to add few words what Akshat mentioned above
1) Saying that alabot copy of ALICE , is just same as ALICE is copy of ELIZA but without looking their engine (parsers , algorithm etc) anybody can say so but look deeper you wont say . ALICE is academic like other similar its ultimate aim is to pass turner test , its answers are human like but may not be relevant also it only answers what its already in databse
look at samples below
Human: how will be weather today ?
ALICE: Ah. A lot of practise.
Human: whats the stock prize of microsoft ?
ALICE: Is there only one?
Human: where is mount fuji ?
ALICE: Where it is hard to find. There might be more than one.
2) Alabot engine is totally different from Alice , we don’t use AIML! . We realized human conversation are dynamic and you can’t have generic statements to give relevant replies , Also you need to take decisions (does customer qualifies for discount ) . How we can do it ?Its no easy task ! Ala algorithm custom solution which consist of rule engine , NLP engine and parser , helper API hooks etc and we are frequently update it till we release public beta.
3) Ala was designed to work as Rapid Application development platform , one can put all business rules and configure NLP and ponetic engine and you can application running in matter matter days or few weeks in all connected mediums IM (yahoo ,gtalk, msn,ICQ,AOL,IRC,Gadu Gadu, Skype) Web (thru web client ), Mobile /Smart phone (GPRS/SMS)
I appreciate responsible comments / suggestion / feedback , i guess better to ignore irresponsible ones in order save everybody time !!
NLP Addict on Mar 17, 2008
I agree with many of you. The ALICE program using NLP is hardly anything new. I remember implementing crude versions of this back in the days of electronic BBSs circa 1990. You can almost fool folks who drop by with AI- for almost 10 minutes. It was a fun tool with Maximus BBS software. Kept visitors coming in!
But I do wonder if this technology can ever evolve to the point that it can do tech support and even replace costly CSRs in the burgeoning call center industry.
Hmmmm