About Us
We've been working over the past 10 years creating a simple drag and drop interface to make artificial intelligence something everybody can use.
Existing Usages
We work across a broad range of industries and provide superior services from simple IVA's to full end to end conversational AI platforms.
United Nations World Food Programme
In 2020 we provided AI services for COVID-19 test scheduling through COVID Schedule and
were introduced to the United Nations Technology Innovations Lab through a call for
technology innovation partners.
This resulted with our name being circulated around the UN agency to see where
our services would also be beneficial.
One of the first introductions to come from this was the World Food Programme who were at times
struggling to keep up with call demand and having a high abandon rate (unanswered calls).
Naturally a good fit for an AI agent, we set about integrating their existing workflows into
a custom AI agent. The results have been fantastic and the abandonment rate
has dropped to zero percent. Now their existing employees have been able to
focus on more specialized tasks because of our technology.
COVID Schedule
At the beginning of the COVID outbreak there was a need to set up large scale testing sites in
the United States, and while this worked, they quickly became overwhelmed with volume. Lines
went on for miles and it immediately became apparent that appointment scheduling would be required.
There were a few problems with this. First off, the group that needed testing the most was least
likely to be comfortable with technology, and so some type of voice interaction would be required.
Due to the pandemic it was close to impossible to staff a call center at the size required to field
all the calls.
Our AI virtual agent proved a perfect fit. Once deployed, lines instantly disappeared,
while keeping sites at capacity and provided interfaces to the system via telephone, web, and chat.
Technology
Putting together a function neural network with state of the art features at scale is hard. That's why we've done it for you.
Simplicity on top of complexity
One thing we've always noticed while looking through the AI space is that everything is built to
be consumed by software developers or experts in the language technology field. By packaging up the
latest developments in a processing pipeline and then exposing that through a drag an drop graphical
user interface. We make it possible for anybody to create AI virtual agents with no knowledge of
the underlying technology.
A side benefit of this is that we're able to swap out the underlying technology for newer developments
and implement the latest research papers without having to worry about breaking API interfaces or
existing systems.
As new technologies become available or improve, they are immediately available and existing systems
just get better.
Natural Language Processing
At the foundation of our work is the NLP layer. This layer allows a computer to understand the components of language. We currently primarily use Spacy, Spark, NLP.js, and in house code for this.
Transformer Pipelines
We use pipelines to extract various things from text such as named entities, features, sentiment, question answering, and more. We use pipelines such as BERT and Wav2Vec2.
Hundred of Servers
We have a large system build on Hashicorp's technology that provides us with instant scaling, regional stability, multi datacenter failover, and support for various levels of hosted microservices (again providing the ability to swap out components at will).
Custom Training Pipeline
We have developed in-house training software to help teach the system what is correct and incorrect and to continuously improve the quality of results through systems such as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks).
Multiple Language Support
The system has been designed from the ground up for multiple language support. When you design a virtual agent you just turn on or off checkboxes for each language you'd like to support and then the definition for each language sits in the same place. There is also automatic transcript translation and TTS (Text to Speech) for testing multiple languages even if you don't speak them.
Conversational Healing
While we're not a fan of the term, we do support it. Traditionally in the conversational AI space this has been used so if something is said later in a conversation, it will change the meaning of what was said earlier in the conversation. For example, "I want to transfer $100 to my savings account. Actually on second thoughts, let's make that $200." We believe that if a normal human would understand a sentence then an AI should too. This shouldn't be a "feature".
Named Entity Recognition
Our system is able to detect and tag named entities such as companies, people, etc. and understand their meaning and significance.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis provides support for understanding how a customer is feeling about their interaction with our AI agents and potentially branch to different paths based on this. For example, you may try to calm somebody down for a bit before continuing if they're getting upset.
Pluggable Architecture
Because of the microservice design of the system, it is easy for us to bridge in new pieces and new research paper findings without negatively effecting the rest of the system. Hashicorp's Nomad allows us to use multiple rollout strategies so we can expose new features to small subsets of customers at a time.
API Shim Layer
Interacting with other legacy systems can be hard and messy. An AI agent shouldn't have to deal with that. We ship off the computational complexity for this to a shim layer so that our AI agents always interact with a simple REST API even though in the background the shim layer deals with SOAP, XML, REST, CSV files, FTP, carrier pigeons, and the like.