January 2018

Editor, William Meisel

Nuance expands its Cognitive Innovation Group Focuses on applying AI and machine learning to customer service across channels

Artificial Intelligence is “hot,” with conversational interaction with digital assistants a major trend. Computer power has passed a threshold where complex technologies such as Deep Neural Nets are practical from a computational point of view, further driven by availability of enough data to support their optimization.

IBM publicity uses the term “Cognitive Computing” rather than “Artificial Intelligence,” and Nuance Communications has used a similar terminology for its Cognitive Innovation Group (CIG).

Nuance says that CIG is focused on applying the latest advances in machine learning and AI

Continued page 24

Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding services available Microsoft makes a major commitment to its cloud-based AI platform

Microsoft announced in December the general availability of two cloud services for building conversational applications, Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), part of Microsoft Cognitive Services. The Microsoft AI platform is

summarized in the chart at the end of this article from a blog entry by Lili Cheng, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, announcing the general availability of the services.

Continued page 25

Amazon expands Alexa options and reach Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote best-selling holiday products

As usual, Amazon is reflecting its heavy investment in its digital assistant Alexa with a number of announcements, as well as continuing expansion of “skills” by outside companies that Alexa supports. In another sign of this continuing investment, Amazon is expanding the Alexa Fund by $100 million (p. 46), and the company announced that Echo and Alexa will come to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (developers can use the Alexa Skills Kit to build skills for customers in these countries using their new respective English models).

The company apparently wants to be, in effect, the operating system for the Internet of Things (and perhaps for more channels over time). This objective has a number of benefits to the company, with perhaps the ability to buy something from Amazon by talking across the room—with minimum barriers to getting what you want—on an impulse. The company is doing well in general; among other accomplishments the company announced,

Continued page 27

LUI News January 2018 2

Table of Contents Nuance expands its Cognitive Innovation

Group 1Focuses on applying AI and machine learning to customer service across channels 1

Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding services available 1

Microsoft makes a major commitment to its cloud-based AI platform 1

Amazon expands Alexa options and reach 1Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote best-selling holiday products 1

Editor’s Notes 5Can machine learning and NLP reduce

objectionable web content? 5Bill Meisel, Publisher & Editor 5

Nuance’s Weideman predicts trends in the customer experience for 2018 5

Companies will use a virtual assistant for customer service, and it will work 5

Mozilla publishes language database and open-source speech recognition 6

DeepSpeech speech-to-text engine has a word error rate approaching human performance 6

IBM Watson Advertising provides interactive ads for food companies and others 7

Campbell’s a recent example 7Microsoft continues to add to Cortana and

search functionality and availability 7Cortana can find and summarize important emails, among other enhancements 7

Google develops TTS technology nearly indistinguishable from recorded speech 8

Text-to-speech software uses punctuation and capitalization to detect emphasis 8

Google’s Content Classification for Cloud Natural Language is generally available 9

Transcription of audio in video files now available as beta release 9

Google improves search and discovery 9Expanded feature snippets and knowledge panels and suggestions for related searches 9

Companies use Google Cloud Video Intelligence to build products 9

Incentro digital asset management and Robotix Media ad campaign management 9

Google attacks the problem of documenting doctor-patient conversations 10

Useful levels of accuracy were achieved in the research 10

Archant to create regional news archive service, supported by Google grant 11

Voice interaction supported by Ubisend 11PullString provides a tool for developing apps

for Alexa 11Includes specialized capabilities and a “conversation canvas” 11

Yeelight launches home speaker with voice assistant 12

Subsidiary of China’s Xiaomi 12Volkswagen’s planned electric cars use voice

for control and digital assistant 12Cooperation with Adobe, Microsoft, and IBM in development 12

Hyundai to deploy voice “Intelligent Personal Agent” in its automobiles 13

Technology developed in partnership with SoundHound 13

Voicebox packages its automotive experience in Voicebox Auto 14

Hybrid operation integrates cloud and in-vehicle speech processing and understanding 14

Waze navigation app adds a voice interface15Hands-free interface with wake-up phrase 15

New version of Philips SpeechLive speech-to-text solution 16

Improved usability with dictation devices 16Shanghai subway to use Alibaba speech

recognition and facial recognition 16Far-field speech recognition will let passengers say their destination and get best route info 16

eXalt releases a new chatbot for its Knowledge Work-as-a-Service Platform 16

“Knowledge Bots” interface addresses the complexities of the B2B sales process 16

Plum Voice adds conversational options for customer service 17

IVR applications designed to reduce caller frustration17Gupshup provides intuitive Bot Builder tools18

Chatbots that work over 30 messaging channels 18Booking.com makes its booking chatbot

available 18Support for travelers’ post-booking questions in natural language 18

Lexalytics platform supports natural language processing applications 19

Build, customize, and deploy NLP applications with the platform 19

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Veritone Developer application supports outside “cognitive” engines 20

Self-service development environment lets developers create, submit, and deploy applications 20

Reason8 provides a transcription and analysis tool for business meetings 20

Creates meeting notes automatically 20The 2017 HITLAB World Cup of Voice-

Activated Technology in Diabetes 21Awards for using voice technology to make it easier for diabetics to manage their care 21

Rubidium provides the voice trigger in 66 Audio headphones with Alexa 22

Bluetooth allows wireless connection to devices 22Telestax adds partners to its WebRTC

platform 22Includes NLP-based services from Lumin.ai, Voxist, and InteliWISE 22

Cove to introduce insurance chatbot in New Zealand 23

Targeting young, digitally-focused newcomers to insurance 23

IP Integration adds CallMiner analytics to its contact center solution 23

Enhanced insight through “Voice of the Customer” 23Lum.AI tool summarizes science research

papers 24Currently working with industry organizations on soil research 24

News briefs ................................................... 29The future of Amazon Web Services, with natural

interfaces a key focus, and deploying AI to the edge 29Chinese Government includes speech recognition and

translation in its three-year plan for artificial intelligence .................................................................. 29

Qualcomm and Baidu develop on-device conversational voice solution .............................................................. 29

Baidu’s iQiyi apologizes for flirtatious avatar assistant, part of a virtual reality headset .................................. 30

Baidu and Huawei partner in AI projects ...................... 30Alibaba and Ford to explore ways to improve consumer

experiences in the automotive industry .................... 30Microsoft updates Corona on iOS ................................. 31Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant to be incorporated

in Microsoft Launcher for Android ............................. 31Google Assistant launched for inexpensive JioPhone in

India in both English and Hindi .................................. 31HomeAdvisor for Google Assistant connects

homeowners and service providers ........................... 31Google Assistant can now do two things in one

command ..................................................................... 32Google reports successful research on optimizing

components of a speech recognition system as a single system ............................................................... 32

Google adds natural-language inquiry to Google Sheets spreadsheet program ................................................. 32

Apple shares machine learning framework on Github 32Want to talk to Siri, but are afraid of being heard—just

whisper ........................................................................ 32GreenKey provides open-source version of its voice

SDK for the financial market ...................................... 32NICE adds automated system health checks to its

system to help financial institutions automate compliance .................................................................. 33

Report suggests progress in AI may be overstated ..... 33“Today’s Call Center Is a Relic in Waiting” ................... 33IBM’s new Power9 chip was built for machine learning33Law firm Norton Rose Fulbright launches Australian

privacy law chatbot using IBM Watson ...................... 34Nvidia Titan GPUs get optimized machine learning

software ....................................................................... 34Northern Light provides research portal for competitive

and market research using machine learning .......... 34Awrel provides voice ordering of dental supplies and

equipment ................................................................... 34ScopeAI uses NLP to analyze customer support

conversations to deliver insights for product and operation teams .......................................................... 35

XMOS provides software for stereo Automatic Echo Cancellation for far-field voice control ....................... 35

Fortemedia voice processing software is in the Samsung Galaxy Note8 .............................................. 35

Louis Vuitton “virtual advisor” for Facebook Messenger built by Mode.ai ........................................................... 35

Jibo can dance ............................................................... 36The Children’s Society launches natural-language

chatbot for Facebook .................................................. 36Tangent builds Facebook Messenger chatbot for Nails

Inc. ................................................................................ 36TriNetX unveils natural language processing service to

extract clinical facts from physician notes and clinical reports .......................................................................... 36

IntelligentWire monitors customer service calls, extracts key information for databases, and creates overall analytics ....................................................................... 36

Mizuho Securities adopts NRI’s AI and speech recognition technology to reduce time spent on compliance .................................................................. 37

Schroder Investment Management in Singapore launches online chatbot ............................................. 37

Minnesota’s Mall of America provides a chatbot to help with shopping .............................................................. 37

Singapore Airlines testing English chatbot ................... 37Bangladesh’s Eastern Bank launches country’s first

customer service chatbot ........................................... 37Elekta collaborates with Palabra to offer voice-enabled

Electronic Health Record software ............................ 38Mobile app for Swedish grocer Coop Sverige lets users

compile a shopping list with voice commands ......... 38Spokata delivers audio news summaries using text-to-

speech technology ...................................................... 38ReadSpeaker now supports Speech Synthesis Markup

Language ..................................................................... 38

LUI News January 2018 4

XMOS enables far-field voice technology for Pegatron Martina smart speaker interface to Google cloud services ........................................................................ 38

Sheetz to offer voice-activated food ordering through Alexa ............................................................................. 39

Aprima Medical Software partners with DocBuddy to deliver mobile workflow app ....................................... 39

Indian-accented English TTS for Indian IVR provided by Go 2 Market India ....................................................... 39

Vonage continues international expansion with new Tokyo location ............................................................. 39

DeepIntent detects fake political ads ........................... 39Amazon Web Services to help build Open Neural

Network Exchange ...................................................... 40Panopto education video platform adds Virtual Reality

support and multi-language speech recognition ...... 40Authentication for meeting management tool uses

authentication employing in part ambient noise ...... 40Advice on building voice experiences from Ahmed

Bouzid, Alexa’s former head of product .................... 41IC Realtime lets you find specific footage in a home

security camera recording by a natural language search .......................................................................... 41

A new type of neural network is made with memristors41Intelligent Voice launches PCI redaction and

transcription application for Zendesk support .......... 41

Statistics and Surveys ................................. 42CNBC finds that audio content delivered through voice

assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant has been popular ........................................................ 42

Conversational User Interfaces a key trend in creating a compelling user experience in 2018, according to Strategy Analytics ........................................................ 42

Smart speakers: Amazon leads the market, but Google is improving its share .................................................. 42

Financial analyst predicts Amazon will earn an additional $10 billion in Alexa-related retail sales in 2020 ............................................................................ 43

More than 20% of US broadband households plan to buy a voice-controlled smart speaker with personal assistant in 2017 ........................................................ 43

Owners of voice-enabled speakers more willing to listen to advertisements if asked first ................................. 43

Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, mostly on their smartphones ..................................... 43

Messenger chatbots have a 98% open rate ................ 44TV manufacturers turning to the user experience to

motivate buyers ........................................................... 44Deep Learning for NLP, advances and trends in 201745More than half of current users of intelligent voice

assistants believe that we will use body language, expression, intonation, and touch to interact with tech devices ......................................................................... 45

Face ID a popular feature on the new Apple iPhone, but sales of the iPhone X may be slower than anticipated45

Many businesses handle sales leads poorly ................ 45

Financial Notes ............................................ 46

Amazon growing Alexa AI fund by $100 million for global expansion ......................................................... 46

Cisco’s John Chambers invests in speech analytics Indian startup Uniphore Software .............................. 46

DigitalGenius raises $14.75 million Series A for natural-language customer service solution .......................... 47

Horizons Ventures backs AI startup Fano Labs ........... 47Verint acquires Next IT ................................................... 47Veritone acquires assets of machine learning firm

Atigeo ........................................................................... 48Replika raises $6.5 million for its personal chatbot ... 48Egypt’s Elves, the digital assistant that isn’t digital,

raises $2 million .......................................................... 48

People ........................................................... 48Nuance Communications appoints Laura Kaiser to its

Board of Directors ....................................................... 48For Further Information on Companies

Mentioned in this Issue 49Vendor Guide by Bill Meisel 57Conversational Interaction Conference (IN

ONE MONTH) 57See program 57

LUI News January 2018 5

Editor’s Notes

Can machine learning and NLP reduce objectionable web content? Bill Meisel, Publisher & Editor

YouTube, owned by Google, recently announced steps to reduce objectionable content such as terrorist videos on its service. This included “better detection and faster removal powered by machine learning,” according to a company announcement. Presumably, this includes speech recognition of the audio in videos and NLP to understand when the content is objectionable.

The company said that over 83% of the videos they removed for violent extremism in the month after these initiates were taken down before receiving a single human flag, up 8% percent over the previous month. Human teams have manually reviewed over a million videos, the company indicated, to improve this flagging technology by providing large volumes of training examples.

The moves also included “tougher standards for videos that are controversial but do not violate our standards” and more human review. These videos remain on YouTube, but they are behind a warning interstitial, aren’t recommended, monetized, and don’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and “likes.”

YouTube is but one example of the issue of objectionable content on the web. Services providing such content have more than an ethical motivation to try to control such content. Advertisers are dropping out when their ads appear with such content and appear to be endorsing it.

Handling such cases requires a difficult tradeoff between allowing free speech and a wide variety of opinions versus obvious “hate” content. Human review can only go so far, and a human reviewing such content will have his or

her own prejudices that might make such review less than objective. On the other hand, using machine learning to make the decision can also be controversial, in part because it is difficult to determine why a statistical method such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) makes a specific decision.

But empirical methods such as DNNs have the advantage that they are guided by examples from humans, but can “average out” outliers that might reflect inconsistent criteria (or errors) and make an “objective” decision. The decision is objective in the very sense that the empirical methods balance in some sense a range of opinions. One could argue that such methods are the only way that human prejudices can be made objective, in a sense by letting the human-labelled examples “vote.” Such arguments could shield the services from having to defend specific decisions, as they might if made by a single human.

An argument that statistical methods are objective and the best we can do in such applications can of course be challenged. For example, there have been examples of machine learning evincing bad behavior when the data they analyze includes examples reflecting prejudices. After all, statistical methods simply summarize the implications of the data. Developers must work to assure that the data analyzed by machine learning does not reflect unfair biases.

Data-driven methods aren’t a perfect solution, but doing nothing about the Web becoming a source for promoting hate isn’t an acceptable alternative. Automated screening can, as a minimum, flag cases for humans to examine more closely.

Nuance’s Weideman predicts trends in the customer experience for 2018 Companies will use a virtual assistant for customer service, and it will work

eWeek interviewed a number of executives on Predictions 2018: How Chatbots, AI Will Lead CX to New Heights in December. One was

Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance

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Communications. He cited a number of interesting trends.

One was that companies will use a virtual assistant for customer service, and it will work. “Conversational AI breakthroughs have led to a new generation of VAs specific to your bank, your telco and your pizza ordering, all providing personalized, concierge-like service. In 2018, this generation of VAs will be made even more effective, through technology called HAVA (Human Assisted Virtual Assistant). HAVA adds a human-in-the-loop capability, first to help answer new questions the VA may not know, but more importantly to provide a learning loop that updates the VA’s ‘brain’ in real time.”

He also noted the potential for addressing customers through messaging channels. “In 2017, Facebook Messenger, Line, Kik and more added capabilities for their users to ‘friend’ organizations and companies, and late in the year, Apple announced Apple Business Chat, which will do the same for Apple Messages. In 2018, you will start engaging brands in the same way you talk to friends–in your messaging app, through SMS and even inside your banking and

telco apps. And AI will allow each brands’ VA engine to respond to you in a personalized way, referencing past engagements you have had across other channels.”

Weideman forecast that predictive customer service will analyze and detect the patterns of customer engagements over time, allowing more appropriate and personalized action of chatbots and digital assistants. He predicted less use of customer service phone lines due to “digital customer engagement combined with mobile devices, tablets, and data lines.” He said, “In 2018 you will engage with a virtual assistant and if they can’t resolve an issue, you will be seamlessly texting with a live contact center agent. If the issue is really complicated and can’t be resolved through messaging, you still won’t call the 800 number. In 2018, that step will be integrated through advanced technologies like WebRTC and IVR-to-digital, allowing the contact center agent to connect with you by voice or video within the app, on your laptop, even through your TV screen or smart speaker.”

Weideman also predicted that voice authentication will be more widely used.

Mozilla publishes language database and open-source speech recognition DeepSpeech speech-to-text engine has a word error rate approaching human performance

The Mozilla Foundation has published a free language database (“Common Voice”) that can be used to create a speech recognition system and an open-source speech recognition program (“DeepSpeech Engine”). Sean White, vice president of technology strategy at Mozilla, wrote in a blog post, “There are only a few commercial quality speech recognition services available, dominated by a small number of large companies. This reduces user choice and available features for startups, researchers, or even larger companies that want to speech-enable their products and services.”

The Common Voice project contains nearly 400,000 labelled recordings in English of 20,000 different people, about 500 hours of speech collected from more than 20,000 people

globally. The database will grow through crowd-sourcing, as visitors to the web site or the project’s iOS app voluntarily speak prompted sentences.

The DeepSpeech Engine has “an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings,” according to White. The speech-to-text software as a word error rate of 6.5% on a test database from LibriSpeech.

The initial release includes pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS, and a command-line binary that developers can use to experiment with speech recognition.

Mozilla is reportedly considering incorporating voice interfaces into its products, including its Firefox browser.

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IBM Watson Advertising provides interactive ads for food companies and others Campbell’s a recent example

Campbell Soup recently teamed with IBM, using its Watson Advertising (previously the ad sales business of IBM’s Weather Channel) to help consumers create new dinner recipes with an interactive text-or-voice chatbot. The ad combines some specialized food intelligence from IBM’s “Chef Watson” with Watson natural language processing APIs, calling on Campbell’s recipe library to generate recipes. IBM has also created food-oriented interactive ads for Country Crock, Swanson, and Hellman’s. IBM has done ads in medicinal products for Flonase and Theraflu, and in other areas, including ads for Toyota and Hulu.

Consumers can either talk to the Campbell’s ad by pressing an on-screen “mic” button or type

in the ingredients they have on hand to start creating recipes. The ad also has buttons labeled with suggested dishes, such as “chicken & broccoli.”

The ad responds to consumer preferences with a message that says “Look what we cooked up,” followed by recipe cards that list ingredients and instructions on how to prepare the dish with a Campbell’s product, such as its line of soups or Pepperidge Farm baked goods. The Campbell’s Watson Ad is available on food and recipe sites, The Weather Channel app, and weather.com. IBM reports that Campbell is returning for a second round with Watson Ads, suggesting the AI-powered ads remain an area of interest for marketers.

Microsoft continues to add to Cortana and search functionality and availability Cortana can find and summarize important emails, among other enhancements

At a press and analyst event in San Francisco on December 13, Microsoft execs showed off AI-powered updates it is introducing in its Bing search engine, Cortana intelligent assistant, and Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools. Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of AI products, noted that many people, hearing the science-fiction-like expectations of artificial intelligence, don’t realize that AI is having a tangible, useful impact on most people’s day-to-day lives through products like search or Office 365 that they use every day. “AI has really been integrated into society for many years,” Ribas said.

Bing search Microsoft is adding multiple viewpoints to Bing search results when the answer isn’t a factual one, such as when a historical figure was born. Asking Bing “is cholesterol bad?” will result in two different answers to that question, explaining that there is “bad” cholesterol (LDL, high levels can lead to plaque buildup in your arteries) and “good” cholesterol (HDL, extracts cholesterol particles from the artery walls and transports them to the liver).

Microsoft also is working to help people find information when they aren’t sure how to search for it. Microsoft is adding prompts to guide users to supply more information on what they’re hoping to find so that the answer can be more precise. Machine reading comprehension will be used to summarize search results.

Microsoft has partnered with the social aggregation site Reddit to add Reddit information to Bing search results. Reddit information from conversations, communities, and Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions (answers from experts and famous people) will be included in search results.

Cortana Microsoft showed that Cortana can do things

such as sort emails and provide a summary of the most important ones—such as an email from your boss—on your commute home.

The company also showed off a feature in Cortana called skills chaining, which suggests another skill based on the one being used. For example, when using Cortana to book tickets to an event, Cortana might suggest adding it to a calendar. Cortana can now integrate with Gmail

LUI News January 2018 8

and Google Calendar accounts in addition to Outlook and Office 365.

Kristina Behr, a partner design and planning program manager with Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research group, noted that we are still in the early days of figuring out how best to get people useful information when they are using another device besides a traditional computer. She said that’s why the company is approaching the challenge as both as a technical issue and a design issue. “We are still scratching the surface on what this looks like,” she said.

Office 365 Rob Howard, director of product marketing

for Office, said that many of the time savers in

Office, such as grammar corrections in Word, are powered by AI, even though customers may not realize it. Microsoft previewed Insights in Excel. It uses machine learning to analyze data in Excel spreadsheets and create pivot tables and charts showing trends and other useful information. A new function, called Tap for Word, will let users surface relevant documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from their organization without leaving the document they are working in. Microsoft also announced plans to release a tool that highlights action items in email and gives you options for responding quickly.

Google develops TTS technology nearly indistinguishable from recorded speech Text-to-speech software uses punctuation and capitalization to detect emphasis

Google recently wrapped up the development of Tacotron 2, the next generation of its text-to-speech technology, as revealed by a research paper “Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions” authored by the firm’s engineers and scientists. Quoting from the paper’s abstract: “The system is composed of a recurrent

sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize timedomain waveforms from those spectrograms. Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech.”

WaveNet was developed by Google’s subsidiary DeepMind.

An entry in the Google Research blog, “Generating Human-like Speech from Text,” also describes the research. Incorporating ideas from past work such as Tacotron and WaveNet, the research team added more improvements to

end up with a new system, Tacotron 2. The blog summarizes: “We use a sequence-to-sequence model optimized for TTS to map a sequence of letters to a sequence of features that encode the audio. These features, an 80-dimensional audio spectrogram with frames computed every 12.5 milliseconds, capture not only pronunciation of words, but also various subtleties of human speech, including volume, speed, and intonation. Finally, these features are converted to a 24-kHz waveform using a WaveNet-like architecture.”

Besides the order of words, Tacotron 2’s pronunciation is also based on punctuation and capitalization, with the solution hence being able to infer the importance of particular words and use these conclusions to decide whether to stress them or quickly go over them. A Google Web site provides impressive examples of the TTS speaking sentences it was not trained on, where, for example, the presence or absence of a comma changes the pronunciation.

The current version supports a single female voice. A new voice would apparently require retraining of the incorporated neural network.

LUI News January 2018 9

Google’s Content Classification for Cloud Natural Language is generally available Transcription of audio in video files now available as beta release

Google has made generally available Content Classification for its Cloud Natural Language Application Programming Interface. The Cloud Natural Language API analyzes the structure and meaning of text through a REST API. The new Content Classification feature automatically sorts text documents into specific categories like health or news, according to a press release. Currently, there are more than 700 categories available.

One example for the real-world application of Content Classification is for media companies that need to understand the business value of their content more fully, the release said. “This means they can build or enhance recommended

content for their users as well as gain a new layer of data to help guide opportunities for their advertisers,” according to the release.

Video transcription, or the ability to automatically transcribe video audio into text, has been an in-demand feature since Google launched Cloud Video Intelligence, the company said. The company has now released video transcription in private beta. Video transcription is initially available in English only, but expansion to new languages is promised soon.

Companies building applications using Cloud Video Intelligence include Incentro and Robotix Media (this page).

Google improves search and discovery Expanded feature snippets and knowledge panels and suggestions for related searches

Google has provided new additions to its search service. The additions include expanded Featured Snippets, algorithmically generated highlights of what’s available on the web that provide quick relevant answers for queries. Google added more images and related searches inside select Featured Snippets to help one learn more about a topic or to discover new things related to the search.

Google also improved the functionality of Knowledge Panels, which show expanded information about specific types of topics; a search for a company name, for example, may show business line, headquarters, and other

information. Google updated Knowledge Panels in search to show more related searches. For example, while looking at the Knowledge Panel about skiing, you’ll see related searches for sports such as snowboarding directly inside the result.

And, while you’re researching a particular topic on Google—like soccer players for next year’s World Cup—and you search for Neymar followed by a search for Messi, you’ll see suggestions for related topics in the same vein at the top of the search results page so you can continue to discover other athletes during your search session.

Companies use Google Cloud Video Intelligence to build products Incentro digital asset management and Robotix Media ad campaign management

Google announced the general availability of its Cloud Video Intelligence, a service transcribing the audio from video content. Google also finds specific “labels” in the video, objects such as dog, flower, or human. Google will continue to expand what objects it can detect. Incentro and Robotix Media were early adopters of the service and have launched products based on the cloud service.

Incentro Incentro, an online service provider that

develops IT solutions on the Google Cloud Platform for media and publishing customers, uses machine learning to address the growing need for their customers to store and find digital media assets. Leveraging Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Video Intelligence, Incentro

LUI News January 2018 10

built Segona Media, an application that can automatically store, tag, and index videos, audio files and images stored in Google Cloud Storage.

Videos can be stored, found, and reused based on their full content, the company said. Incentro also integrated Cloud Video Intelligence to take advantage of labels supported by Google. Customers can leverage the technology without the need for Incentro to continually maintain models or update their application.

Robotix Media Robotix Media offers a fully managed

solution designed to optimize the effectiveness

of social marketing campaigns. For deeper insights into popular video advertising content, Robotix integrated Cloud Video Intelligence. This allowed them to develop a system for analyzing video ad performance.

Using Cloud Video Intelligence, Robotix can identify objects in every scene in ads delivered on social media, then make recommendations for further advertising. For example, Robotix may recommend that a client adds parameters related to detected labels or use the labels to source new videos for the advertiser to test in their ads. Robotix claims clients using their technology to design new video ads have seen viewing times go up by as much as 30%.

Google attacks the problem of documenting doctor-patient conversations Useful levels of accuracy were achieved in the research

A recent study from the University of Wisconsin and the American Medical Association found that primary care providers spend close to six hours of their 11.4 hour workdays on providing documentation for Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems; documenting patient interactions may add an average of 1.5 evening hours in the office to cope with their workloads. Using scribes is one approach that is increasingly used to reduce this burden, according to the American Health Information Management Association.

In a new research paper, a team from Google describes a system that goes beyond the usual transcription of conclusions dictated by a physician after a consult to capturing a natural conversation between doctors and patients in a typically noisy clinic setting. Ideally, such technology can be used to automatically label some elements of the conversation, such as drug names. The system can also be used to help a physician or a scribe identify and locate issues discussed in a recording and be more efficient in reporting.

“Good documentation helps create good clinical care by communicating a doctor’s thinking, their concerns, and their plans to the rest of the team,” wrote Katherine Chou, Product Manager and Chung-Cheng Chiu,

Software Engineer, Google Brain Team, two of the researchers, in a blog post on the research.

Two different natural language processing models were applied to conversations involving drug names, clinical diagnoses, and other common elements of a medical consultation. One looked for specific whole words and the other operated at the phonetic level. They proved relatively effective at different tasks.

“While most of the current automatic speech recognition (ASR) solutions in the medical domain focus on transcribing a doctor’s dictation (single speaker speech consisting of predictable medical terminology), our research shows that it is possible to build an ASR model which can handle multiple speaker conversations covering everything from weather to complex medical diagnosis,” the blog post says.

Using 14,000 hours of anonymized training data, the team created and tested two types of speech recognition tools: a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) phoneme-based model and a Listen Attend and Spell (LAS) grapheme-based model.

Variable accents, noises, and recording qualities usually lead to high error rates with traditional speech recognition tools, which may frustrate clinicians nearly as much as having to type out documentation. But when the two

LUI News January 2018 11

models were applied to a subset of the training data annotated by professional medical scribes, they produced lower error rates and high levels of precision and recall. The CTC model achieved 92%t precision and 86% recall on important phrases in unidirectional models. The LAS method achieved 98.2% recall when asked to recognize drug names included in the conversations. The LAS model was better able to cope with noisy recordings, and the CTC method required more data cleanup before it could produce its results.

Both models performed well when identifying medical terms and clinical jargon—most of the errors were related to more casual parts of speech that may have less of an impact on creating meaningful and accurate clinical documentation.

Chiu and Chou indicated that a further pilot study with Stanford University will investigate what types of clinically relevant data can be extracted from conversations in an effort to reduce the need to interact with the EHR.

Archant to create regional news archive service, supported by Google grant Voice interaction supported by Ubisend

Archant, a privately owned regional media group in the UK, has received a grant worth €676,000 from Google’s Digital News Initiative. The grant is to fund a new project, Local Recall. Archant will digitize its archive content dating back to 1870 using manual enhancement via community text editors. Then, working in conjunction with Ubisend, create a fully voice-activated chat service.

Ubisend builds natural-language chatbots. The company said its first goal for the project is for a user to be able to ask date-related things like: § ‘What happened today in 1934?’ § ‘What was the headline news on the 4th of

January 1899?’ The company said that, once they have

processed enough data from Archant’s archives, the users will be able to ask things such as:

§ ‘Tell me the headlines on the Queen’s coronation.’

§ ‘When was the last time Norwich Football Club won a game 6-0?’

§ ‘What else happened on the day the Second World War was declared?’

The project directly addresses the major challenge to the regional media of having its content, especially its archive material, largely inaccessible in its current format. Local Recall will take content digitization further by making the original and unique content from its regional press archive available, not just in plain text, but also voice. After the process, Archant’s content will be available on demand via chatbot, voice bot, home assistant, and the more traditional website.

PullString provides a tool for developing apps for Alexa Includes specialized capabilities and a “conversation canvas”

PullString develops apps for platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant. The company announced PullString Converse a platform and tool to help agencies and brands build Alexa skills themselves.

The company said that PullString Converse is focused on empowering digital professionals, brand specialists, digital marketers, and agency folks to create interactive dialog. The company indicates that it has incorporated its years of experience in the field—including best practices,

guide posts, and workflows for designing natural interactions and structures, as well as specialized capabilities for chit chat, error handling, starting and exiting, and more. The company indicated it will continue to add features over time.

PullString Converse is designed around a “conversation canvas,” providing an intuitive way to visualize a voice user interface. A developer can lay out pre-defined conversation blocks (such as a greeting block) on the canvas and customize them. PullString Converse

LUI News January 2018 12

automatically lays-out the blocks in the overall conversation flow. The application can be previewed through a web page by multiple groups within an organization.

PullString indicated that, with Hello Barbie, Mattel leveraged PullString Converse to power more than 30 hours of conversation between children and the talking doll.

Yeelight launches home speaker with voice assistant Subsidiary of China’s Xiaomi

China’s Xiaomi’s subsidiary Yeelight, which is known for making smart home products, has launched Yeelight Voice Assistant, a smart speaker (see image). The speaker’s voice assistant is believed to be Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant, since Xiaomi entered into a partnership with Microsoft last year. The Mi MIX smartphone featured Cortana.

Yeelight Voice Assistant includes six microphones and a single 2-Watt speaker. The company says that the device comes equipped with a voice wake-up algorithm with a range of 5 meters, acoustic echo cancellation, and beamforming technology for echo reduction. The speaker comes with five buttons on the top side—an action button, microphone on/off, volume up, volume down, and mute. The device supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE).

The Yeelight Voice Assistant can also be used for controlling other smart home products from Yeelight, such as smart LED bulbs, table lamps, bedside lights, and ceiling lights. While it currently supports only Xiaomi smart home

products, the company has said that support for more devices will be included in the coming days.

The Yeelight Voice Assistant smart speaker has been listed on the company’s crowdsourcing platform for a price of 199 Yuan, roughly $30. The company is expected to start shipping the device January 31 in China.

Xiaomi Yeelight Voice Assistant

Volkswagen’s planned electric cars use voice for control and digital assistant Cooperation with Adobe, Microsoft, and IBM in development

Volkswagen presented three electric concept vehicles at the LA Auto Show. Volkswagen has said that, by 2025, it plans to sell one million electric vehicles per year.

One model, the I.D. CROZZ, exemplifies automation, from voice-activated doors and trunk to self-driving technology. The system activates self-driving either by voice control—“Hello I.D., please activate Pilot mode”—or by touching the Volkswagen logo on the steering wheel and holding it.

In addition, the I.D. CROZZ sports five “Smart Lights”—interactive, slender LED elements that can communicate with passengers. The Smart Lights in the door panels become active as the driver or one of the passengers starts voice control to open or close one of the doors—a visually supportive element that shows the activation of voice control. Another Smart Light above the Active Info Display in sight of the driver becomes active as the driver says, “Hello I.D.”

LUI News January 2018 13

At the same time, this Smart Light assists the driver by giving visual cues in the form of interactive light signals in navigation and potentially hazardous situations. For example, if the vehicle detects a pedestrian on the right side of the car, for instance, the Smart Light then points this out with a flashing red signal from that direction.

Instead of a large number of control units, the vehicle electrical system will have powerful central board computers with central software that can always be updated and upgraded. This new architecture is the basis for new digital in-car services.

In a joint project of Volkswagen with Adobe, potential customers are targeted in social

networks and will then find information on the I.D. CROZZ owners customized according to their profiles on a new Volkswagen internet portal. And Volkswagen is cooperating with Microsoft for augmented reality that allows VW to present the new car virtually with the help of HoloLens glasses, for example in shopping malls.

Further, infotainment is being developed together with IBM in a service called Predictive WE Services, referring to the Volkswagen WE digital ecosystem. The basis for this is a Watson digital assistant that researches possible intermediate destinations for shopping or dinner and can make reservations for dinner with a voice command during the journey.

Hyundai to deploy voice “Intelligent Personal Agent” in its automobiles Technology developed in partnership with SoundHound

Hyundai Motor Company announced in December the development of an “Intelligent Personal Agent,” a voice-enabled virtual assistant system. The functionality will be deployed in new models set to roll out as early as 2019.

The assistant was co-developed by Hyundai and SoundHound. SoundHound’s Houndify platform supports speech recognition, with a specialty in music search, discovery, and connected streaming capabilities (LUI News, October 2017, p. 23).

Intelligent Personal Agent allows drivers to use voice commands for many different operations and real-time data through connection with the Internet. The Intelligent Personal Agent acts as a proactive assistant system, predicting the driver’s needs and providing useful information, Hyundai indicated. For instance, the system may give an early reminder of an upcoming meeting and suggest departure times that account for current traffic conditions.

Other features include the ability to make phone calls, send text messages, search destinations, search music, check weather and manage schedules. It also allows drivers to voice-control frequently used in-vehicle functions such as air-conditioning, sunroofs, and

door locks, while gathering various information about the vehicle. The Intelligent Personal Agent supports a “Car-to-Home” service, enabling the driver to control electronic devices at home with voice commands.

Paul Choo, Director of Infotainment Development Group at Hyundai said, “Sophisticated voice recognition and AI integration are core to effectively providing drivers with the massive content and data that future connected vehicles have to offer. These elements play a key role in delivering connected-car-generated information.”

The Intelligent Personal Agent supports a “multiple-command recognition” function. When the user says, “Tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow and turn off the lights in our living room,” the system recognizes two separate commands in the same sentence and completes each task separately.

Intelligent Personal Assistant is based on SoundHound’s Houndify platform optimized for in-vehicle applications. When activated, the system reacts to the driver’s voice commands or questions by communicating with a SoundHound AI server to search for the requested information or complete a task.

The Hyundai-SoundHound partnership began in North America in 2014, with an in-car

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implementation of SoundHound. The new global expansion will begin in Korea with the new 2018 Hyundai Veloster model, with additional models to follow, according to SoundHound.

SoundHound has developed a feature set designed specifically for car integration, including the company’s music features. SoundHound has expanded its music database, including the integration of Korea Telecom’s (KT’s) Genie Music catalog to reach a wider

audience in Korea, and enabling faster, more accurate music recognition.

The KT partnership represents a continuing strategic initiative between SoundHound and KT to bring new technology to Korea. In 2017, SoundHound raised a Series D round of funding to support further expansion of its voice-enabled AI platform, Houndify, with both Hyundai and KT participating as strategic investors.

Voicebox packages its automotive experience in Voicebox Auto Hybrid operation integrates cloud and in-vehicle speech processing and understanding

Voicebox recently announced Voicebox Cloud, its next-generation conversational AI platform (LUI News, December 2017, p. 12). The company has now announced Voicebox Auto, packaging its past experience in voice interfaces for automobiles.

Voicebox indicated it has worked with automakers such as Toyota, Lexus, Chrysler, Fiat, Dodge, Renault, Subaru, Daimler, and Mazda over the past decade. The company has shipped automotive products that range from in-dash embedded speech recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) solutions to after-market navigation devices. Solutions have included hybrid systems, where some processing is done in the vehicle and some in the cloud. Voicebox Auto natively supports hybrid operation, in which user requests can be serviced by the vehicle’s embedded system and cloud-based conversational AI when connected or by the vehicle alone when connectivity is not available.

Voicebox Auto joins two other offerings: Voicebox Cloud and Voicebox Edge. Cloud-based systems offer far greater flexibility and scope, while embedded systems have lower latency because they have no network delays.

Voicebox Cloud is a cloud-based conversational platform that handles the challenges of voice interaction—tuning of speech recognition, semantic parsing and entity recognition, building the machine learning models that understand linguistic context and identify user requests, and more. Voicebox Edge is a software development kit for creating

embedded conversational interfaces and connecting them to cloud services. The can work together to give flexible conversational interfaces.

Voicebox Auto includes: § AI services for intelligent dialogue

management; § Core speech I/O services for dynamic speech

recognition and text-to-speech; § Data mining and analytic services to drive

continuous improvement; § A hybrid connector that joins the cloud and

embedded worlds into a single system; and § An API and SDK that eases development on

automakers’ embedded platforms. Voicebox Auto includes the option of Voicebox Professional Services, providing VoiceBox’s lengthy experience in the automotive industry to auto companies through consulting engineers.

VoiceBox notes that hybrid-mode operation provides a “hybrid lift” effect. Because each system is distinct, they react slightly differently to user requests. Usually both systems have the same answer, but sometimes the embedded system finds one interpretation of the user intent and the cloud system another. An arbitrator module, powered by machine-learning technology, selects which response to present to the user. The overall system thus outperforms the accuracy of either system alone; this generally offers a five to ten percent boost in accuracy, the company said.

Collecting large quantities of high-reliability data about what’s happening inside vehicles and how drivers use their cars has always been an

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obstacle for auto-makers. Now, the combination of mobile connectivity and conversational interfaces enables Voicebox Auto’s Voice Trace feature to report on dozens of environmental and performance metrics from the processing of the audio in Edge and from the car itself.

Automakers using the hybrid system thus have access to real-world, real-time data collection from the car. Voicebox uses this data to improve vehicles’ conversational experiences, while automakers will use it to gain better understanding of the total vehicle environment and improve the comfort and safety of future designs.

Voicebox Auto has an ambitious roadmap of future improvements: § Cloud first, intelligent edge: As the power of

cloud-based processing creates increasing use of this option, Voicebox will bring the latency and scalability of Voicebox Auto to a level needed to meet the forecasted demand of billions of utterances per year.

§ Edge processing: Voicebox will leverage increasingly-powerful vehicle systems to provide an “Intelligent Edge” to the cloud, further improving latency and the user experience through advanced caching, predictive analytics, and Over-the-Air features.

§ Speech recognition improvements: A vehicle moving in traffic—subject to road noise, radios, and engine noise, as well as the particular echo patterns created by the

vehicle’s cabin—creates problems for speech recognition. Voicebox’s speech recognizer has been trained on hundreds of thousands of recordings manually collected in vehicles. Moving forward, Voice Trace will give Voicebox vastly more real-world training data. With that data, the company can significantly improve the speech recognition accuracy specifically for automobile use.

§ Conversational Intelligences: “Conversational Intelligences” is a suite of new capabilities for the next generation of natural language understanding. These combine semantic parsers built for natural conversations, plan-based reasoning capabilities to enable a true digital-assistant experience, and data sources and services for carrying out intelligent requests. For Voicebox Auto, Conversational Intelligences will be tailored to automotive scenarios.

“Location Intelligence” will be the first conversational intelligence for Voicebox Auto, the company indicated. With Location Intelligence, Voicebox Auto will be able to handle complex queries such as “get me directions to the pizza place across from the movie theater on Cherry Street,” as well as to intelligently understand that requests such as “take me to the Seahawks game” actually mean “find somewhere I can park within easy walking distance of the stadium, and get me directions to that.”

Waze navigation app adds a voice interface Hands-free interface with wake-up phrase

Waze provides a popular navigation app of that name that incorporates information from its users (that are driving as they use it) as a guide to current traffic. The company updated its iOS and Android apps in December.

One update is the Talk to Waze feature. It gives you the power to command the Waze app by voice, incorporating the wake-up phrase, “OK Waze.” It’s an evolution of the existing Waze Voice Commands.

You can now initiate your drive, get a preview of the route ahead, send reports, and add a pit

stop—all hands-free. Talk to Waze is currently available for English-speaking Wazers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, and New Zealand. Waze indicated it will be available in more languages soon.

Other features include a new Motorcycle vehicle type option and HOV route support. The latter provides Waze users with additional navigation options and arrival times based on high-occupancy-vehicle lanes (aka carpool lanes) on their route.

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New version of Philips SpeechLive speech-to-text solution Improved usability with dictation devices

Speech Processing Solutions has launched a new version of their cloud-based Philips SpeechLive dictation and speech recognition workflow solution. The latest version of the solution comes with improved usability, new features, and enhanced stability, the company indicated.

An enhanced upload client automatically feeds audio files from dictation recorders straight into the SpeechLive system. The new feature works on Windows computers with

Philips and other audio recording devices. Users plug in their dictation recorder to their PC and the files will transmit automatically. Another new feature of SpeechLive 8.5 is that transcriptionists receive automatic email notifications whenever new dictations arrive in their SpeechLive inbox.

Philips SpeechLive offers two additional productivity-boosting services to their users: Philips Speech Recognition Service and Philips Transcription Service.

Shanghai subway to use Alibaba speech recognition and facial recognition Far-field speech recognition will let passengers say their destination and get best route info

The subway system in the Shanghai, China, will bring in speech and facial recognition technologies developed by e-commerce firm Alibaba Group as it looks to make life easier for the millions of commuters on one of the longest and busiest mass-transit railway networks on the planet. The new service uses “intelligent ticket machines.”

Alibaba, its affiliate Ant Financial Services Group, and Shanghai Shentong Metro Group, the operator of the Shanghai Metro, said in a joint announcement that the Metro would install far-field speech recognition technology in ticket machines in all stations, as well as facial recognition systems at the entrance of stations to verify the identities of commuters.

Passengers would be able to tell their destination to ticket machines, and the machines would then recommend the best route. “Passengers don’t even need to use any special

word to activate the kiosk,” said Yan Zhijie, director of intelligent speech recognition at Alibaba’s Institute of Data and Science Technology. Yan said the far-field voice recognition technology enables accurate communication with a smart device from a distance of up to five meters, even in extremely noisy public areas like subway stations.

For the facial recognition, commuters would be required to submit their photos to be put into a database for verification by the system.

No launch dates for the new systems were given. Ant Financial’s Alipay payment option for Metro, the smartphone app of the Shanghai Metro, will be available early next year.

Shanghai Metro’s network of 367 stations accounts for 53% of all public transport in the city. Average weekday traffic on the Shanghai Metro stands at 10.65 million individual trips.

eXalt releases a new chatbot for its Knowledge Work-as-a-Service Platform “Knowledge Bots” interface addresses the complexities of the B2B sales process

eXalt Solutions, a provider of cloud-based Knowledge-Based Sales Systems for Business-to-Business (B2B) enterprises, announced that it has released a new chatbot interface for its Knowledge Work-as-a-Service (KwaaS) Platform. The new feature provides users with

the choice of using an intuitive conversational interface in conjunction with a web form-based experience or independently. eXalt’s new chatbots have the advantage of leveraging the KWaaS Platform’s rules engine to conduct more

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dynamic conversations that can be based on the state of the customer interaction.

eXalt has dubbed the chatbot as a “Knowledge Bot.” eXalt’s KWaaS platform supports codeless deployment of both web- and chat-based interfaces from a single knowledge base, providing support for complex conversations with minimal programming. eXalt’s Knowledge Bots are capable of adapting dialog for complex conversations based on prior responses as well as personalizing responses based on user identity. eXalt has implemented its Knowledge Bot to assist in sales conversations for both Server Solutions and VoIP telephony solutions.

The Knowledge Bot is said to offer advantages over classic chatbots, including: § Common Knowledgebase for Codeless Web

or Chat Deployment: With one instance of rules or meta data put into a KwaaS platform, users can deploy a web form experience and/or a chatbot experience.

§ Seamless Session: The Knowledge Bots are part of a seamless session that is shared across both the web and chat.

§ Conversational Context or Memory: Knowledge Bots are able to conduct dynamic conversations; they remember prior

parts of the conversation and are able to adjust downstream responses.

§ Support Complex Conversations: Knowledge Bots can incorporate the intelligence of company experts and can support complex conversations. They can advise and act as full-fledged recommendation advisors as well as perform rules-based administrative tasks.

§ Personalized Conversations: Knowledge Bots support sustained personalized conversations tailored for different customers or partners.

The company’s Knowledge Work-as-a-Service (KWaaS) cloud platform scales out the B2B enterprise with three types of digital knowledge workers: Digital Advisors help buyers access smarter ways to shop and solve problems, Digital Administrators make businesses more connected to themselves and each other, and Digital Analysts offer business improved visibility and can anticipate and act on change. eXalt says its philosophy is Better Together where humans and digital knowledge workers produce more at a higher level of quality as a team.

Plum Voice adds conversational options for customer service IVR applications designed to reduce caller frustration

Plum Voice characterizes its business as a “communications platform as a service (cPaaS) provider for the enterprise.” The company announced in December new conversational applications for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) customer service. Using conversational dialogs and natural language processing to determine caller intent in real-time, Plum’s ”AI-powered” IVR applications are intended to enable contact centers to reduce caller frustration. Based on a customer’s intent, Plum’s applications direct callers to the right self-service application or agent to resolve their specific issue.

Plum’s cloud platform includes “VoiceTrends” analytics, which provides actionable data to track the customer journey and to optimize IVR applications. Pre-built

applications and templates from Plum Voice save significant development time and resources. Plum’s library of application templates for automating common processes include Account Status, Address Change, Benefits Enrollment, Clinical Trials, Order Fulfillment, Password Reset, Payment Processing, Prescription Refill, Virtual Agent.

Plum Voice CEO Andy Kuan, summarized, “AI is very complicated technology. But we’ve made it accessible to companies and optimized it for voice interactions. This provides enterprises of all sizes with a good entry point for getting started with AI.”

A request to Plum Voice from this newsletter for more details on the underlying technology behind the new “conversational” applications went unanswered.

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Gupshup provides intuitive Bot Builder tools Chatbots that work over 30 messaging channels

Gupshup provides a chatbot and bot development platform. The company announced its Flow Bot Builder tool, designed to let marketers create a fully-functioning chatbot regardless of technical skill.

Beerud Sheth, Gupshup CEO, said that conversational experiences are set to transform virtually every business function from marketing to sales to support. He outlined the ways he considers that Flow Bot Builder is a step forward in usability, simplicity, and extensibility, including: § Running on over 30 messaging channels

across text, voice, web, and app; § Integration with common development tools

like GitHub, allowing builders to share and clone bots; and

§ Incorporation of rich media such as images, audio, video, and emojis, in addition to plain text.

The Gupshup Flow Bot Builder is built on top of the Gupshup Bot Builder. Sheth says that, with one click, a user can convert the graphical flow into programming code and then have the full ability to make any programmatic changes to it. It is a fully integrated developer environment (IDE). Large teams can collaborate where the marketer or the designer may use the flow Builder to create the conversational flow and the software developers add the integrations and other advanced capabilities to it in parallel.

Booking.com makes its booking chatbot available Support for travelers’ post-booking questions in natural language

Booking.com (part of the Priceline Group) announced the expansion of the pilot version of its new service and support chatbot, the Booking Assistant, now widely available for English-language bookings worldwide. As the latest evolution of Booking.com’s messaging platform, the Booking Assistant merges internally developed natural-language technology with Booking.com’s customer service support.

The Booking Assistant empowers customers to get first-line support for their upcoming bookings, including timely responses to their most common stay-related requests, all through a single intuitive chat interface. The Booking Assistant identifies and automatically responds to an increasingly broad range of post-booking related questions from travelers through their preferred device and platform.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com with 19,000 travelers in 26 countries, 50% of consumers don’t mind if they deal with a real person or a computer, as long as their questions are answered. Booking.com data

indicates that 80% of customers prefer self-service in order to get the information they need.

The Booking Assistant uses natural language processing technology to identify the most frequently asked questions from customers, including topics like payment, transportation, arrival and departure times, date changes, cancellation requests, parking information, extra bed requests, pet policies, WiFi and internet availability, as well as a variety of greetings and thank-you messages. Booking.com is currently training the model to refine the current number of questions it can manage into more than 90 specific subtopics that can be quickly identified and handled appropriately.

The Booking Assistant was built as a mobile-first experience and has been adapted to operate natively within the iOS and Android versions of the Booking.com app, as well as in Facebook Messenger. It can also be accessed through the Booking.com website on desktop, mobile or tablet.

Booking.com indicates the chatbot can currently respond to 30% of customers’ stay-

LUI News January 2018 19

related questions automatically in less than 5 minutes. If the Booking Assistant identifies a question it can’t solve on its own, depending on the nature of the question, it pulls in support from either the Booking.com customer service team or the property, adding their response directly into the conversation. In addition, the Booking Assistant always identifies the source of the information, so that it’s transparent for customers.

James Waters, Global Director of Customer Service at Booking.com, said, “For us, AI is not

about replacing human interaction, but is instead a vehicle to facilitate an even more personalized, instantaneously gratifying and frictionless travel experience for consumers. As we operate in an industry that is incredibly personal, emotional, and complex, maintaining the right balance between genuine human interaction and efficient automation is something we’re always trying to fine-tune and optimize throughout every stage of the consumer journey, including with the Booking Assistant.”

Lexalytics platform supports natural language processing applications Build, customize, and deploy NLP applications with the platform

Lexalytics supports natural language processing for social media monitoring, reputation management, and voice of the customer programs. The company announced the launch of Lexalytics AI Assembler, a machine learning platform designed to simplify and accelerate the process of gaining insights from a large quantity of natural language enterprise data. Lexalytics is also launching a limited-availability beta release of Semantria Storage & Visualization, a content storage, aggregation, search, and reporting framework that provides business analysts and marketers a single access point to interact with their data.

The announcement is a result of years of internal R&D coupled with the work coming out of its Magic Machines AI Labs, a partnership among Lexalytics, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Data Science and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications.

Lexalytics AI Assembler and Semantria Storage & Visualization will be part of the overall Lexalytics Analytics Platform, which also includes Salience and Semantria API.

AI Assembler AI Assembler is a pipeline for building

machine learning-based artificial intelligence applications for natural language processing. With AI Assembler, Lexalytics is now providing enterprise customers with tools to accomplish

tasks like raising the accuracy of Named Entity Recognition. AI Assembler includes: § Multiple curated machine learning

algorithms ideal for analyzing a wide variety of text data, from short, jargon-filled tweets, to long, technical contracts and research papers;

§ Fully automated hyperparameter optimization of the machine learning algorithms with the “best research built-in”;

§ Operationalized AI incorporating standard processes (logging, undo/redo, maintenance of gold-standard test sets, structured maintenance and improvement of models, and rebuilding of independent models) to simplify, automate, and enforce key procedural action items; and

§ The Machine Learning Builders team of Lexalytics data scientists and machine learning experts to assist with customers’ unique NLP challenges.

Semantria Storage & Visualization Semantria Storage & Visualization connects

Lexalytics’ existing products—AI Assembler, Salience, Semantria and Semantria for Excel—with a flexible search and reporting framework. Semantria Storage & Visualization features: § Filtering and search of processed content,

enabling analysts to quickly sort out their desired content;

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§ Content storage and aggregation with the capability of storing billions of documents in one place; and

§ Reporting and graphical representations of data insights to enable sharing across teams

and departments, including templates for Tableau and other business intelligence platforms.

Veritone Developer application supports outside “cognitive” engines Self-service development environment lets developers create, submit, and deploy applications

Veritone offers a platform, aiWARE, uses “cognitive computing” to analyze unstructured public and private audio and video data for clients in a variety of markets, including media, politics, law, and government. The platform integrates an ecosystem of cognitive engines and applications.

In December, the company announced the general availability of its Veritone Developer application. Veritone Developer is a self-service development environment that lets developers create, submit, and deploy public and private applications and cognitive engines directly into the aiWARE architecture. Veritone Developer supports RESTful and GraphQL API integrations as well as engine development in major categories of cognition, including transcription, translation, face and object recognition, audio/video fingerprinting, optical character recognition (OCR), geolocation, transcoding, and logo recognition.

Tyler Schulze, vice president and general manager of the partner ecosystem at Veritone, said, “Exposure to Veritone’s growing portfolio

of blue-chip clients via a single interface that makes it easy to train, test, and deploy AI offerings is highly attractive to development partners while supporting our overall mission of delivering purpose-driven AI solutions across any type of organization.”

Several new speech recognition and computer vision engines, including face, logo, vehicle, and license plate recognition, have been qualified and are in the final deployment stages within Veritone Developer, the company indicated. Sentiment analysis, action classification, and text and visual content moderation engines are also in the near-term pipeline.

Veritone says it has identified and is curating a global funnel of over 7,000 cognitive engines across 7 major classes and 60 defined categories of cognition. It expects the volume of engines deployed in aiWARE to increase significantly with the full release of Veritone Developer.

Veritone also announced it has acquired the advanced data analytics software and related intellectual property assets of Atigeo Corporation (p. 48).

Reason8 provides a transcription and analysis tool for business meetings Creates meeting notes automatically

US startup Reason8 has launched a transcription and analysis service for business meetings. The “AI assistant” transcribes meetings, labelling speakers in the transcript. The tool uses natural language processing to identify tasks that arise from the conversation, with a plan to add the creation of meeting notes in the future. Reason8 plans to add linguistic and voice analysis with the potential to act like a coach and offer individual guidance on improving in-meeting performance.

At least two smartphones are required to record any one meeting via the app for speaker separation. Once individual users have identified themselves in the app, it can link their name with their voice footprint to include their name in meeting transcripts. Reason8 is using Google’s cloud speech API for the speech-to-text conversion of meeting audio.

“In-person meetings are the least digitized field in personal communications,” said co-founder Vlad Belyaev, announcing the product at a conference. “It is a huge market. All of us

LUI News January 2018 21

make meetings, and make meeting notes, write meeting summaries and meeting minutes. Our first niche is to focus on managers who spend a large amount of time on making meeting minutes and on tracking the tasks that they gave to their employees.”

The company has raised $1.2 million in early-stage funding. The app is currently for iOS only, since it’s easier to calibrate microphones across the more homogenous Apple iPhone hardware

than Android’s diverse range of devices. But an Android version is planned for next year.

The app has a highlight button that users can manually tap on within the app to flag important sections during a meeting. Any highlighted portions will then be incorporated into the meeting report it delivers.

Privacy is obviously an issue. Record8’s website states that it’s encrypting the data in transit to the cloud and claims not to be storing any meeting data.

The 2017 HITLAB World Cup of Voice-Activated Technology in Diabetes Awards for using voice technology to make it easier for diabetics to manage their care

HITLAB states its goal as improving the quality and accessibility of healthcare worldwide by helping organizations create, evaluate, and diffuse technology-based solutions to healthcare issues. The company works with a wide variety of stakeholders in both the public and private sectors to design and disseminate studies, programs, and products that improve healthcare access and delivery.

The company created the international HITLAB World Cup competition, an event that identifies and supports innovators who help patients around the world manage, understand, and take part in their health. This year’s event, the 2017 HITLAB World Cup of Voice-Activated Technology in Diabetes, sponsored by Novo Nordisk, a Danish multinational pharmaceutical company, was centered on Type 2 diabetes, a condition affecting over 422 million people worldwide. The finalists created innovative solutions using voice-activated technology to make it easier for diabetics to manage their care. At the HITLAB World Cup, five demos were judged on their impact, innovation, sustainability, and feasibility, with a grand prize of $50,000 going to the winner and $75,000 in total prizes.

The winner was LIGHTHOUSE, which helps people living with diabetes take the next step in their diabetes health plan. This voice-activated application connects patients to personalized education and activity plans to pursue their health targets, and enables

physicians to bill between-appointment care to Medicare.

The other applications, in the order they finished in the competition, were: § My Diabetes Coach, created by

Macadamian, is a cloud-based application specifically for young people with Type 2 diabetes. It provides personalized voice-enabled support to help better manage care, and integrates data from wearables and, via an AI engine, identifies patterns where a patient might need more assistance from their care team.

§ T2D2 offers personalized nutritional assistance and connected social support through Alexa Skills and a special chat-bot. T2D2 simplifies dietary self-management for diabetics with an emphasis on sustainable but impactful dietary adjustments.

§ Palette provides a voice-enabled “smart placemat” that tracks the nutritional content of a meal through biomarkers. It sends that data to physicians, where it’s incorporated into part of the treatment plan to improve overall health outcomes.

§ Proof is a voice-activated system powered by blockchain to support diabetic patients and their caregivers. The service supports patient-provider relationships and makes it easier for diabetics to communicate with their care team. Following a value-based reward system, Proof distributes bitcoin for rendered services.

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Rubidium provides the voice trigger in 66 Audio headphones with Alexa Bluetooth allows wireless connection to devices

Rubidium Ltd., a developer of embedded voice user interface technology, announced that its voice trigger was integrated into the 66 Audio PRO Voice wireless headphones, voice-triggered Bluetooth headphones with Amazon Alexa built-in. Users simply say “Alexa” to interact with Amazon’s cloud-based voice service, using the device (e.g., a smartphone) connected by the Bluetooth wireless connection. PRO Voice communicates in real-time with 66 Audio’s native iOS and Android app MotionControl.

In general, Rubidium’s voice trigger allows headphones, headsets, speakers and other devices to be always-listening for the trigger. Rubidium ported its always-on speech recognition engine to the Qualcomm Bluetooth chip series as well as to other chips and cores,

providing small-footprint voice wakeup and speech recognition for mobile and wearable applications.

The functionality can run while a headset is playing music, including support for Qualcomm aptX and AAC music codecs. Qualcomm aptX HD audio ensures a Bluetooth-enabled device can deliver High Definition (HD) audio. Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression; designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

Rubidium expects additional voice-triggered headphones, hearables and wearables carrying its technology to hit the market in 2018.

Telestax adds partners to its WebRTC platform Includes NLP-based services from Lumin.ai, Voxist, and InteliWISE

The RestcommONE platform from Telestax is a WebRTC platform that supports cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployment configurations. WebRTC is a collection of communications protocols and APIs that enable real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections. RestcommONE supports enterprise class real-time messaging, voice, and video applications.

Telestax announced that it has added five more application partners to the RestcommONE Marketplace, which allows participating service providers to offer on-demand real-time applications and solutions that are integrated into the RestcommONE Platform. Applications in the Marketplace are also available for purchase for on-premise use. The new marketplace application partners feature chatbots, AI-enhanced scheduling, and next-generation voice mail.

One application partner Lumin.ai offers an AI-as-a-service platform that augments a live-chat workforce by engaging end customers in a natural-language conversation. It can operate in

two-way mode (conversing directly with an end user) or three-way mode (advising a live agent who is conversing with an end user).

Voxist offers a voicemail application for mobile that acts as a virtual personal assistant. Callers get personalized greetings and recipients of the call can read voicemail messages as text through the Voxist transcription service. Users access Voxist voicemail messages through the app, or through email when away from a phone.

InteliWISE offers an AI-Chatbot Virtual Assistant that supports natural language processing (NLP) for customer service. Used for intelligent, automated, and live-assisted (Live Chat, Facebook Messenger) customer engagement and e-commerce, InteliWISE cloud-based solutions are deployed by global banking, insurance, and retail enterprises and public-sector organizations.

The other newly announced partners are TeligentIP (formerly IPitimi), which develops smart UC, business intelligence, CRM and messaging applications for carriers, contact

LUI News January 2018 23

centers and enterprise clients in several verticals; and Somos Discovery, with solutions that include a cloud-based multi-tenant virtual

IVR/PBX, telephony reminder applications, SMS broadcasting, SMS alerts, and telephony intercom security applications.

Cove to introduce insurance chatbot in New Zealand Targeting young, digitally-focused newcomers to insurance

Cove, is a New Zealand insurance startup that is about to introduce an insurance option to be fully managed by a chatbot. The idea is to economically and efficiently address prospects’ questions about insurance options (see example below).

Chatbots can simplify the process of purchasing traditionally complex products such as life insurance. Cove claimed that, internationally, chatbots in the insurance industry have enabled claims to be paid in as little as 3 seconds, and policies purchased in just 90 seconds. The company indicated that early feedback from consumer testing has been “extremely positive.” The company plans to introduce the service to New Zealanders in 2018.

Insurance purchases are typically triggered by life events or significant purchases—having your first child, buying your first home, etc. As traditional insurance companies struggle to connect with this younger digitally-focused market, chatbots offer a way to open the conversation and educate this audience of the role life insurance plays in their lives, as well as providing a simple manner to purchase the policy that best suits the individual.

As the younger and more technologically adept market continues to grow, the insurance industry has a responsibility to transform its image from a complex, policy focused sector, to one that is more in tune with providing an exceptional user experience for all New Zealanders.

Andy Cove, a co-founder, said, “Existing insurers are focusing on innovating

incrementally, with small improvements in the insurance customer experience being made occasionally. Cove is a digital-first company, with more developers on staff than marketers, and we plan to innovate rapidly, always with the customer top of mind.”

Cove insurance chatbot

IP Integration adds CallMiner analytics to its contact center solution Enhanced insight through “Voice of the Customer”

CallMiner, provider of speech and customer engagement analytics platform

CallMiner Eureka (LUI News, September 2017, p. 20), announced a partnership with IP

LUI News January 2018 24

Integration Limited (IPI), to embed CallMiner’s technology in IPI’s contact center and customer engagement solutions. The CallMiner Eureka Engagement Analytics platform will enable IPI’s clients to fully understand the voice of the customer (VoC) by capturing and analyzing every interaction, regardless of communication channel.

IPI delivers ‘out of the box’ contact center solutions to organizations in all industries. By partnering with CallMiner, IPI indicates it has “future-proofed” its managed analytics services

and is ready to support its clients as they begin to embrace AI and automation.

Valur Svansson, Principal Consultant, IPI, said “The CallMiner partnership will enable us to deliver enhanced insight to drive successful customer engagement and springboard our clients to the next level of VoC and voice of the contact center (VoCC) programs. Whether through our MAS (Managed Analytics Solution) or direct platform deployment, our clients will have access to the intelligence they need to improve services and coach and develop their agents.”

Lum.AI tool summarizes science research papers Currently working with industry organizations on soil research

The University of Arizona has licensed an automated information extraction software system invented in the university’s College of Science to startup Lum.AI. Lum.ai is providing a natural language processing tool that takes unstructured text and turns it into structured data.

The NLP tool was originally developed for researchers at the US Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help identify causal pathways in cancer research and children’s health. The tool was used to interpret and summarize cancer

research papers. The technology processed more than 1 million papers from Pub Med in one year and has the capacity to “read” one scientific paper in 10 seconds.

Lum.ai is now applying the same approach to soil research. The Soil Health Institute, The American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, Soil Science Society of America are partnering with Lum.AI on a project to accelerate the retrieval and use of soil health research. NLP pushes information derived from published papers to the researcher in a format that is easier to understand than traditional meta-analyses of scientific literature.

Nuance CIG (cont.) Continued from page 1

to augment, automate, and improve customer service across channels. First launched in 2012, CIG’s AI Lab incubated and unveiled Nina, a conversational solution for mobile customer service. The group’s research resulting in Nuance’s Human Assisted Virtual Assistant (HAVA) solution, now branded as Nina Coach. The group’s charter will now span predictive AI and analytics, supported by the new AI Engagement Services and AI Research teams.

Nuance notes that, with the proliferation of connected devices, enabling intelligent customer interactions across channels is growing more complex and enterprises are looking for ways to

automate. According to Gartner, by 2022, 85% of CIOs will be piloting AI programs through a combination of buy, build, and outsource efforts. CIG is intended to bring vendor and enterprises together to discover and incubate the next generation of AI-enabled solutions specific to a company’s individual business needs. Nuance notes that customers including Fidelity Investments, USAA, Dominos, and ING Bank have engaged with the group since its inception.

Thomas Hebner has been appointed the new worldwide leader of CIG. Hebner spent time leading both Nuance’s Voice User Interface (VUI) design and Professional Services groups in the Enterprise division.

Hebner said, “This group is successful because we are not only on the bleeding edge of

LUI News January 2018 25

innovation but also in touch with what our customers need to deliver the best service in their specific markets. By collaborating with leading global brands to dig deep into the areas where our technology can be the most powerful, we are able to invent forward-thinking AI capabilities that improve experiences while reducing cost.”

The newly expanded initiative will focus on conversational AI, predictive AI, and analytics through the following workgroups: § AI Lab focuses on strategic experimentation

to align AI innovation with market needs. Led by Paul Tepper, a PhD in Technology & Social Behavior, the Lab matches the latest technology advances with the specific needs of enterprise customers.

§ Engagement Services focuses on building real repeatable AI solutions. Led by Kenneth Arakelian, CIG Engagement Services helps enterprise customers overcome complex

issues by prioritizing and formulating roadmaps, and using research and Innovation Workshops to aid in advancing AI implementations, focusing on the nuts and bolts that drive tangible results.

§ Research is building “the AI roadmap of tomorrow,” Nuance indicated. The 300-person Nuance Corporate Research team focuses on developing core algorithms and technologies that will be foundational to sustained leadership and innovation in the customer service AI market.

Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Division, Nuance, said, “CIG has been instrumental in propelling our leadership role in the market, from launching Nina to building our advanced AI learning loop. The further expansion into analytics and predictive AI is demonstrative of our continued investment to make AI real for the enterprise.”

Microsoft Services (cont.) Continued from page 1

Together, the Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding service enable developers to create conversational interfaces for various scenarios like banking, travel, and entertainment. Microsoft indicated, for example, that a hotel’s concierge can use a bot to enhance traditional e-mail and phone call interactions by validating a customer via Azure Active Directory and using Cognitive Services to better contextually process customer requests using text and voice. The Speech Recognition service can be added to support voice commands.

Cheng noted that more than 760,000 developers from 60 countries are using Cognitive Services to add intelligent capabilities to their applications. Additionally, over 240,000 developers have signed up to use the Azure Bot Service. Cheng indicated that intelligent applications are being developed by companies such as Dixons Carphone, Equadex, virtual reality game developer Human Interact, Molson Coors, Sabre, and United Parcel Service (UPS). (See “Company Adoptions” in this article.)

Azure Bot Service Azure Bot Service is used to create

conversational interfaces for channels such as mobile apps, websites, and messaging platforms, including Microsoft’s Cortana and Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger, without adapting their code for each one. Microsoft added new Premium Channels to Azure Bot Service that allow customers to communicate directly with their website or app users, avoiding the need to share information with public chat services. Customers also have access to open-source software that allows them to customize their chatbots.

Microsoft has also expanded Azure Bot Service beyond the US, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. The service is now available in a total of nine Azure regions, including Ireland, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Azure Bots are essentially templates for specific types of applications. These include: § Commerce Chatbot: A relatively general

template for conversational interfaces for scenarios like banking, travel, and entertainment;

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§ Information Chatbot: The Informational Bot can answer questions defined in a knowledge set or FAQ using Cognitive Services QnA Maker and answer more open-ended questions using Azure Search.

§ Enterprise Productivity Chatbot: Azure Bot Service can be combined with LUIS to build enterprise productivity bots, allowing organizations to streamline common work activities by integrating external systems, such as Office 365 calendar and customer cases stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Language Understanding Intelligent Service LUIS allows developers to create bots that

accept natural language input and take appropriate action (see image below for an example). The system can be used by developers with limited experience with the technology to create custom models for their companies that are tailored to specific verticals. LUIS is now available from seven new Azure data center regions, including Texas, Virginia and Ireland, for a total of 12 regions.

LUIS also has an updated user interface. It expands coverage for up to 500 “intents” (such as booking a flight or contacting a help desk) and 100 “entities” (such as the destination for booking a flight). For example, a travel app with LUIS would extract from the sentence ”Book me a ticket to Paris” an intent named BookFlight and entity Location as “Paris” to process the order. Developers can get started quickly with out-of-the-box templates including basic, form, language understanding, question-and-answer, and proactive bots.

Several Microsoft technologies work with LUIS: § Bot Framework allows a chat bot to talk with

a user via text input; and § Bing Speech API converts spoken language

requests into text. Once converted to text, LUIS processes the requests.

Company adoptions Equadex uses LUIS in its software for

children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Children affected have difficulty communicating and verbalizing their thoughts. Equadex

provides a mobile app that provides a visual representation of language. With the Microsoft Cognitive Services REST APIs (including the Computer Vision API) and Microsoft Azure tools, Equadex was able to incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence into its Helpicto app.

One of the largest global beer brewers, Molson Coors, uses Microsoft tools to give its employees better access to knowledge in the organization and better ability to collaborate across time zones. The company is exploring the use of knowledge bots for specific IT and procurement topics, leveraging Microsoft Cognitive Services QnA Maker, Azure Bot Service, Microsoft Teams, and the Calendar.Help service powered by Cortana.

To improve customer service with intelligent applications as well as increase the efficiency of IT staff, delivery service UPS recently improved service levels via a chatbot, the UPS Bot, using the Microsoft Azure services. Customers can engage with the UPS Bot in text-based and voice-based conversations to get the information they need about shipments, rates, and UPS locations.

Kumar Athreya, Senior Applications Development Manager of Shipping Systems, UPS, said, “Within five weeks, we had developed a chatbot prototype with the Microsoft bot technology. Our Chief Information and Engineering Officer loved it and asked that we get a version into production in just two months…and that’s just what we did.”

Dixons Carphone found that approximately 90% of the customers at retailers under its umbrella start their shopping journey online, and 65% use their mobile phones to assist them while shopping in store—both of which required a review of existing customer experience strategies.

From research before a store visit to price comparison and reading reviews at the shelf edge, Dixons Carphone customers now use the Internet as part of their shopping experience at the stores under the company’s umbrella. The company used Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services to create a

LUI News January 2018 27

conversational bot named Cami. The bot answers questions through the company’s Currys brand website and Facebook Messenger to help customers and store colleagues research,

find, and save products and check stock, to provide consistent online and in-store experiences.

§

An example of Microsoft’s Language Understanding processing

Amazon expands Alexa (cont.) Continued from page 1

shoes purchased on Amazon.com during the holiday season, if they were lined up end-to-end, would stretch from Alaska to Miami.

Amazon discussed in announcements: § What was popular during the holiday system

and the year; § An expanded developer preview of

notifications for Alexa skills; § Alexa for Business; § New ways to earn money with Alexa skills;

§ New gaming experiences with Alexa Gadgets, and

§ Amazon Music Unlimited was expanded to 28 more countries around the world.

More broadly, the Amazon CTO discussed the “21st Century Architectures” that Amazon Web Services is providing, including a focus on natural interaction (p. 29).

Popular Amazon items Amazon reported that the Echo Dot and Fire

TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were not only the top-selling Amazon devices this

LUI News January 2018 28

holiday season, but they were also the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon. Amazon also emphasized its support of small businesses, indicating that more than one billion items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide this season, and over just five days (from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday), nearly 140 million items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs. Customers worldwide shopping on the Amazon App increased nearly 70% this holiday season. Across North America and the Europe, associates at 10 fulfillment centers picked, packed, and shipped more than one million customer packages in a single day.

Expanded developer preview of notifications for Alexa skills

Amazon announced an expanded developer preview of Notifications for Alexa Skills, which allow Skills to alert customers about new information. Developers can apply to participate in a developer preview of Notifications, which will be generally available in the first quarter of 2018.

Customers can opt in to Notifications. The capability is already available for Amazon Shopping and select skills.

Alexa for Business Alexa for Business is a new service that helps

organizations use Alexa in the workplace. Alexa skill developers can build skills that help organizations and employees use Alexa to be more efficient. Amazon expects the capabilities will be available as organizations deploy Alexa-enabled devices across a variety of locations, including at employee’s desks, in conference rooms, and in common locations throughout the workplace.

Administrative features provide organizations with the ability to manage skills, users, and devices across organizations. Skills or groups of skills are deployed directly to devices provisioned within the organization. These can be selectively enabled across rooms or types of rooms that the company defines. A company can also optionally manage and invite users to use

these same Alexa skills on their personal devices.

New ways to earn money with Alexa skills Amazon announced two new voice-first

monetization opportunities for Alexa skills. The features are currently available in developer preview, and will be available broadly in 2018.

Alexa “In-Skill Purchasing” allows a company to sell premium content or digital subscriptions within a skill. For example, customers can now subscribe to Double Jeopardy! to get extra clues each weekday. To start, there will be two types of in-skill purchasing: one-time purchases, and subscriptions.

In some cases, a company will also be able to offer this premium content at a discount or for free to Amazon Prime members as a benefit of their membership. The company will get paid regardless of the customer’s Prime membership status, Amazon indicated.

Amazon Pay is now available for Alexa skills, so that customers can easily pay for goods and services in a skill using the information already in their Amazon account—without needing to remember their username and password.

The pay features are currently available for US Skills.

New gaming experiences with Alexa Gadgets

From games with Alexa Gadgets to video games, Alexa is bringing new ways to play. In September, Amazon introduced Alexa Gadgets, a new category of connected products and developer tools and the first Alexa Gadget, Echo Buttons. Amazon announced that, early next year, they will release the public beta of the Gadgets Skill API so a developer can create gaming experiences for Echo Buttons. The company will provide sample code a developer can reference to build interactive games that involve single or multiple players, first to buzz in, sequence and pattern matching, or trigger other forms of engagement with Alexa skills.

LUI News January 2018 29

Amazon Music Amazon Music Unlimited has been expanded

to 28 more countries around the world. Millions more customers across the globe can access Amazon’s on-demand streaming service and enjoy a catalog of more than 40 million songs,

thousands of playlists and personalized stations with voice controls for music powered by Alexa on Echo Devices. Amazon said that, this year, four times more music from Amazon Music was streamed over Alexa compared to last holiday season.

News briefs The future of Amazon Web Services, with natural interfaces a key focus, and deploying AI to the edge

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels discussed the cloud-native architectures that will define future applications at Amazon Web Services at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. He said the company will deliver natural interfaces, with security and managed services embedded throughout back-end systems. “We are delivering tools now for the systems you want to be running in 2020,” Vogels said.

Matt Wood, AWS general manager for artificial intelligence, said Amazon is working to make it easier to train AI models in its cloud, then deploy them to the edge of networks. Brainstorming sessions on the technology led to the path of pairing the cloud’s “infinite compute” with “some sophistication on the device.” (See Editor’s Notes, “Speech recognition and NLP at the Edge,” LUI News, December 2017, p. 5.) Chinese Government includes speech recognition and translation in its three-year plan for artificial intelligence

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of China released a three-year action plan (2018 -2020) on December 14 to drive development and growth of artificial intelligence (AI) over the period. The plan includes specific targets in areas such as smart drones, facial recognition, medical diagnosis, speech recognition, and translation. The average accuracy rate of Chinese speech recognition is targeted at 96%. The amount of public training data such as basic speech, video images, and text dialogues will be greatly increased, bringing together industry-specific data on a wide range of industries such as healthcare, finance, and transportation to support entrepreneurial innovation.

The Plan aims for platforms of intelligent connected vehicles to be reliable and safe enough to support highly automated driving by 2020. In addition, large-scale production and application of smart robots in the household (used for cleaning, care of the elderly and disabled, medical rehabilitation, children’s education) and in public services (such as fire rescue, disaster relief) are targeted.

The Government will promote the development of frameworks for cloud-based training of AI systems and terminal applications, algorithm libraries, and toolsets. It will also support open source development platforms, foster growth of an open source community, and encourage key leading enterprises to build a new industrial ecosystem based on open source technologies for software, hardware, data, and applications. Qualcomm and Baidu develop on-device conversational voice solution

Qualcomm Technologies has announced that it will collaborate with China’s Baidu to develop a conversational system for smartphones.

LUI News January 2018 30

Baidu already has its DuerOS operating system, which includes a digital assistant. It would appear that DuerOS is targeted at the domestic China market.

The partnership with Qualcomm will promote the use of DuerOS on Android smartphones that use chips such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform. The two companies say their strategic collaboration will use both parties’ experience and expertise in AI to optimize DuerOS with the Qualcomm Aqstic hardware and software, supporting a complete AI voice and smart assistant solution for global smartphone and IoT devices.

Keith Kressin, SVP, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, said, “The collaboration with Baidu will bring AI for voice enabled solutions to next-generation Snapdragon mobile platforms, allowing users to wake-up smartphones and IoT devices using their voice in their natural language at any time and at extremely low power, while utilizing Baidu’s DuerOS voice services.” Baidu’s iQiyi apologizes for flirtatious avatar assistant, part of a virtual reality headset

Can a computer be charged with sexual profiling? iQiyi, the online streaming unit of Baidu, which owns China’s biggest internet search engine pulled offline a virtual-reality avatar depicted as a flirtatious secretary in revealing clothes, hours after the Wall Street Journal asked whether such depictions encourage a view of women as sexual objects in the workplace.

The virtual-assistant avatar, named “Vivi,” was in beta testing for a virtual-reality headset device sold by iQiyi. Vivi was intended to help users complete tasks via voice commands—such as selecting a film or videogame to play. But it could also flirt with users and respond to commands to dance, according to user reviews posted on Chinese gaming websites and online forums.

The company said in a statement after removing the avatar: “The earlier version of the product is a beta-testing version designed to gather users’ feedback. iQiyi has noticed the issue raised by media and already taken the product offline for further modification. We’d like to make an apology for the concerns it might have raised.” Baidu and Huawei partner in AI projects

Baidu, the Chinese search giant, and Chinese smartphone maker Huawei said they have come to a “comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement” that will see the two companies team up on a variety of tech initiatives including artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and speech recognition. The two companies aim to cultivate an open mobile and AI ecosystem built on shared success, while spurring the development of new AI applications and providing global consumers with AI that “knows you better.”

The two companies will work together on speech and image recognition for smart devices to enable more seamless human-machine interaction. They will also jointly build an augmented reality (AR) ecosystem, combining hardware and software.

Baidu and Huawei plan to build an open ecosystem using Huawei’s HiAI platform and Baidu Brain, a compendium of the company's AI assets and services. The open ecosystem will leverage Huawei’s Neural Network Processing Unit (NPU) and Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning framework to empower AI developers and provide consumers with a broad range of AI offerings and new smart service experiences.

“The future is all about smart devices that will actively serve us, not just respond to what we tell them to do,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer Business Group. Alibaba and Ford to explore ways to improve consumer experiences in the automotive industry

Alibaba Group and Ford Motor have agreed to explore ways to improve consumer retail experiences in the automotive industry, as the automaker looks to improve sales growth in China. Under the agreement, Ford will be working with four of Alibaba’s business units—operating-system developer AliOS, cloud-computing platform Alibaba Cloud, digital-marketing arm Alimama, and

LUI News January 2018 31

B2C shopping site Tmall—to identify opportunities in these areas as well as artificial intelligence, infotainment, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT).

According to a statement from Alibaba, he companies will initially conduct a pilot study to explore potential new retail opportunities at various stages of the automotive ownership cycle, from pre-sales to test drives to financial leasing options.

Alibaba Group Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang, said, “Our data-driven technology and platform will expand the definition of car ownership beyond just having a mode of transportation and into a new medium for a smart lifestyle.”

Alibaba introduced its automotive operating systems in 2016, and shortly after unveiled a new internet car with China’s largest automaker SAIC Motor. Today, more than 400,000 internet cars powered by AliOS are being driven in China, the company said, while over 50 brands are working with Alibaba in domains ranging from automotive OS, speech recognition, driverless-car technology, high-precision mapping, new retail services, auto financing, and in-vehicle payment systems. Microsoft updates Corona on iOS

Microsoft’s Cortana has been updated on Apple’s iOS devices to Version 2.6.4. The update adds improvements to voice detection with an “enhanced listening mode” as well as an improved “upcoming” view mode for calendar and reminders. Listening mode, when enabled, allows hands-free wakening of Cortana by saying “Hey, Cortana.” Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant to be incorporated in Microsoft Launcher for Android

At Microsoft’s Everyday AI event, Harry Shum, Executive vice president of Microsoft’s AI and Research group, announced that Cortana features would be coming to Microsoft Launcher for Android, which allows personalization of the home page and connection with Microsoft applications such as calendars for Android phones. Microsoft’s Cortana App reportedly has less than 5 million downloads in the Google Play Store, while Microsoft’s Launcher has more than 10 million downloads, suggesting integrating the app may increase Cortana exposure. Google Assistant launched for inexpensive JioPhone in India in both English and Hindi

The JioPhone feature phone from Reliance has launched in India in limited numbers. The phone has a deposit of Rs 1,500 ($23), refundable after three years on returning the phone. You have to purchase a plan to use the phone, but that can cost as little as Rs 153 ($2) monthly. Pre-booking for the JioPhone has closed due to extremely high demand.

The demand is likely to increase with Google’s announcement at the Google for India event in New Delhi. The phone will soon receive the Google Assistant, replacing a less-capable virtual assistant which comes with the device. Reportedly, the Google Assistant will be able to do nearly all of the things it can do on Android. The JioPhone runs on KaiOS. The Assistant on JioPhone will be available in English and Hindi. HomeAdvisor for Google Assistant connects homeowners and service providers

HomeAdvisor has developed an “action” for the Google Assistant to allow homeowners to find and connect with local home service professionals using voice commands. Chris Terrill, CEO of ANGI Homeservices, which owns and operates HomeAdvisor, in a statement, said, “Having built the products and technology to seamlessly connect homeowners and service providers on demand, HomeAdvisor is the ideal home services marketplace to partner with voice assistants across the spectrum.”

HomeAdvisor’s Instant Connect technology uses back-end telephony to connect users immediately on the phone with available, local professionals. HomeAdvisor said it has connected more than 45 million homeowners with pre-screened home service professionals in home service categories ranging from remodeling to gutter cleaning.

LUI News January 2018 32

Google Assistant can now do two things in one command Google Assistant has been updated to support commands that have up to two conditions. For

example, you can tell the Assistant to do things like raise the temperature and start playing music in one command. Making a query with more than a pair of requests doesn’t work, and you can’t combine a “routine” that does a series of pre-programmed steps with another command. Google reports successful research on optimizing components of a speech recognition system as a single system

A Google research blog, Improving End-to-End Models For Speech Recognition by Tara N. Sainath, Research Scientist, Speech Team, and Yonghui Wu, Research Scientist, Google Brain Team, the researchers noted that traditional speech recognition systems are comprised of an acoustic model (AM), a pronunciation model (PM), and a language model (LM), all of which are independently trained, and often manually designed, on different datasets. Training independent components creates added complexities and is suboptimal compared to training all components jointly. The researchers addressed the potential for such an approach in “State-of-the-art Speech Recognition With Sequence-to-Sequence Models,” which describes a new end-to-end model that they found surpasses the performance of a conventional system. The end-to-end system achieves a word error rate (WER) of 5.6%, which corresponds to a 16% relative improvement over a strong conventional system which achieves a 6.7% WER. Google adds natural-language inquiry to Google Sheets spreadsheet program

A competitor to Microsoft Excel, Google is expanding features, including allowing you to ask a question in the “natural language” of your spreadsheet, e.g., “What is the sum of revenue by salesperson?” or “How much revenue does each product category generate?” You get the right pivot table returned as a result. A pivot table summarizes key implications of the data in the spreadsheet. Apple shares machine learning framework on Github

Apple shared a new machine learning framework called Turi Create on Github. According to Apple, Turi Create is designed to simplify the development of custom machine learning models.

Turi Create is designed to export models to Core ML for use in iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS apps. Turi Create covers several common scenarios including recommender systems, image classification, image similarity, object detection, activity classifier, and text classifier. Want to talk to Siri, but are afraid of being heard—just whisper

Apple has filed an application to patent “a digital assistant that is capable of detecting a whispered speech input and providing a whispered speech response.” In the document, Apple provided a few scenarios when a whispering assistant might come in handy, like “while studying in a library where speaking loudly may be prohibited” or “while working at a cubicle with other co-workers surrounding the user.” The application also cites “protecting the user’s privacy” as a reason why Siri might need to better detect and understand a whispering user, and why it’d be necessary for Siri to quietly whisper back. GreenKey provides open-source version of its voice SDK for the financial market

GreenKey, creator of software with speech recognition designed for financial markets, announced the firm has joined the Symphony Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization fostering innovation in financial services through open source software (OSS). GreenKey will release a Community Edition of its voice Software Development Kit (SDK) that will enable banks and other financial market firms to voice-enable any web application.

GreenKey Community Edition provides a free commercial license to access desktop “voice widgets” written for popular browser frameworks that can be embedded into financial firms’

LUI News January 2018 33

existing web applications to enable secure calling capabilities. The project will be called GreenKey and released into the Symphony Software Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. NICE adds automated system health checks to its system to help financial institutions automate compliance

NICE’s COMPASS is a solution to help financial institutions automate the compliance assurance process around requirements to record conversations associated with a trade. NICE is introducing an Automated Voice Trade Communication and Recording System Health Check capability as part of its NICE COMPASS solution suite.

The new capability is designed to help financial services organizations (FSOs) provide accurate records of trading communications, in accordance with MiFID II’s strict regulations that go into effect Jan. 3. As part of those regulations, financial firms will have to ensure that the systems used to conduct and record trading communications are fully operational at all times, and that captured voice recordings are of high quality and useable. MiFID II’s stricter compliance assurance requirements also imply that FSOs should institute proactive alerting systems to notify if a voice trade communication system is not working or if conversations are not being properly recorded and retained. The NICE COMPASS Automated System Health Check capability tests all communication and recording processes and associated systems to ensure continued performance and call recording quality. Report suggests progress in AI may be overstated

A new report, Artificial Intelligence Index: 2017 Annual Report, tries to gauge the actual progress being made in AI. “There’s no question there have been a number of breakthroughs in recent years,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the authors of the report. “But it’s also clear we are a long way from artificial general intelligence.” Brynjolfsson points to remarkable advances in image classification and speech recognition. But he cites the narrowness of these tasks. The software cannot adapt if the nature of the task changes slightly or if they see something completely unfamiliar.

The report is part of an ongoing effort to quantify progress in artificial intelligence and identify areas where more is still needed. The other authors are Yoav Shoham, a professor at Stanford; Raymond Perrault, a researcher at SRI; Jack Clark, director of policy at OpenAI; and Calvin LeGassick, project manager for the AI Index. “Today’s Call Center Is a Relic in Waiting”

Andy Peart, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at Artificial Solutions, wrote an article for Forbes with the title, “Today’s Call Center Is A Relic In Waiting.” Peart quotes a survey that found that more than half of customers reaching out to a call center hang up without having their issue resolved. He claims that “It’s clear this system can’t persist.”

Peart suggests that conversational AI is a natural next-gen iteration to the call center for its ability to handle customer queries and readily provide necessary information. “Through natural language interaction (NLI), customers can communicate via talk, text or type in ways that feel completely natural to their own native tongue, manner of speech, and cultural proclivities.”

Artificial Solutions provides tools for developing virtual assistants. IBM’s new Power9 chip was built for machine learning

IBM announced the general availability of its latest generation Power chip, the Power9. The company intends to sell the chips to third-party manufacturers and to cloud vendors including Google. Meanwhile, it’s releasing a new computer powered by the Power9 chip, the AC922 and it intends to offer the chips in a service on the IBM cloud. The company has designed the new chip specifically to improve performance on common AI frameworks like Chainer, TensorFlow, and

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Caffe, and claims an increase in speed for workloads running on these frameworks as much as 4 times. Law firm Norton Rose Fulbright launches Australian privacy law chatbot using IBM Watson

International law firm Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) has launched ‘Parker,’ said to be Australia’s first law firm chatbot for privacy law concerns. The chatbot helps businesses respond to data breaches, an area of increasing concern for business leaders with the implementation of mandatory data breach reporting (MDBR) requirements in Australia on 22 February. Under the new regulations, failure to notify customers about qualifying data breaches could results in fines. The chatbot is intended to provide information and not legal advice to users.

NRF used the IBM Watson platform to build Parker. Nvidia Titan GPUs get optimized machine learning software

A new Nvidia GPU Cloud provides researchers with software containers that are designed to provide developers with a fast execution environment for training machine learning systems using the chipmaker’s Graphical Processing Units. Those containers were already available for use with the machine learning-oriented DGX-1 and DGX Station computers, along with cloud instances powered by Nvidia Volta chips that run on Amazon Web Services. Customers can now use them on consumer hardware, Nvidia’s Titan series of chips. Because the Nvidia GPU Cloud software is all kept inside software containers, it’s possible for developers to take the systems that they’ve trained on a personal machine and more easily deploy them on one of Nvidia’s larger-scale AI machines, or in the cloud. Northern Light provides research portal for competitive and market research using machine learning

Northern Light announced the first commercial delivery of SinglePoint v11, the company’s platform for competitive intelligence and market research, to a “computer software company.” The company called the software a “significant evolutionary step toward the notion of an automated market research assistant.”

SinglePoint provides users single-search access to and analysis of primary and licensed secondary research content, relevant social media postings, and business news. It is used by marketing, sales, and product development professionals at global enterprises.

SinglePoint v11 features powerful machine learning capabilities for cognitive search based on Google’s TensorFlow library of machine learning algorithms. Northern Light’s machine learning solution enables the system to automatically synthesize, refine, and present critical information distilled from large collections of market intelligence content within a SinglePoint portal.

The system examines documents on a search result that contain the most important insights, and then automatically summarizes the insights in an easy to read report format. Northern Light’s machine learning algorithms find the important ideas in the report or news article and summarize it in a few sentences. The user can pick a document that is of interest from the original search result and click on the “more like this” button to have SinglePoint rewrite the search query to generate an entire search result of on-target items automatically.

The system generates content recommendations for the user based on his or her behavior, interests and preferences, determined through automated analysis of user downloads, saves, and shares. The system examines documents on a search result that contain the most important insights, and then automatically summarizes the insights in an easy to read report format. Each key point includes links to the underlying documents. Awrel provides voice ordering of dental supplies and equipment

Awrel, a provider of web, mobile, and voice solutions for the dental market, unveiled its Awrel Partners Portal Platform, which enables dental supply companies and labs to provide intelligent,

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voice-guided ordering of implants, supplies, and equipment. Companies using Awrel can private-label their offerings, define unique workflows, and create company- and product-specific conversational exchanges.

The product works with any computer, mobile device, or digital voice assistant, such as an Amazon Echo or Google Home. Users respond to product-specific prompts from a voice-powered agent, or chatbot. Each subsequent interaction follows an intelligent, protocol-based conversational flow. After the order is completed, it can be sent via message to the supplier or lab, or customized to flow directly into an existing electronic ordering system.

Arnold Rosen, Awrel’s CEO, said in a statement, “We soon realized that dentistry could logically benefit from next-gen voice assistants. This is a logical extension of our offerings.” ScopeAI uses NLP to analyze customer support conversations to deliver insights for product and operation teams

ScopeAI helps businesses and customers by automating the process of communicating insights about customers to product and operation teams. The ScopeAI product uses natural language processing to extract insights from customer support conversations. It integrates with existing support channels such as Zendesk, Intercom, and Desk.com (Salesforce) to automatically tag and analyze conversations for trends in customer feedback. The product automates the process of: § Customer support teams manually tagging support tickets; § Tracking and documenting trends; and § Communicating insights to product and operation teams. XMOS provides software for stereo Automatic Echo Cancellation for far-field voice control

XMOS, a supplier of embedded voice and audio solutions for the consumer electronics market, has released the XVF3500 voice processor, which supports stereo Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC), along with a stereo AEC far-field linear microphone array solution, the VocalFusion Stereo Evaluation Kit (XK-VF3500-L33).

The XVF3500 voice processor delivers 2-channel full duplex AEC. The solution is designed for developers working in the voice-enabled smart TV, set-top box, and digital media adapter markets, all of which require stereo-AEC support for far-field voice-interface solutions.

The XVF3500 voice processor delivers voice digital signal processing, including a full duplex AEC with barge-in capability that enables users to interrupt or pause devices that are playing music, and an adaptive beamformer that follows a speaker. Additional features include dereverberation, automatic gain control, and noise suppression. Fortemedia voice processing software is in the Samsung Galaxy Note8

Fortemedia is providing its ForteVoice iS820 advanced voice processing software with Self-Adaptive Adjustment features to the Galaxy Note8, Samsung’s smartphone. The Galaxy Note8 offers multiple microphones and improved voice quality, even in noisy environments. ForteVoice’s noise suppression reduces background noise in the calling mode.

Samsung includes its intelligent assistant Bixby in the Galaxy Note8. Other features include barge-in capability and Acoustic Awareness, a noise environment classifier indicating the noise environment under which the smartphone is operating. Louis Vuitton “virtual advisor” for Facebook Messenger built by Mode.ai

Luxury brand Louis Vuitton has launched a “virtual adviser” on Facebook Messenger for US clients using technology from Mode.ai. The chatbot will answer queries such as searching the brand’s online catalog, pulling up catwalk shows and history about the brand, and giving tips for product maintenance.

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“We are still in the very early stages of AI technology adoption in the retail industry,” said Eitan Sharon, CEO of Mode.ai. Sharon said he expects more companies to turn to AI as clients demand a more personalized online shopping experience. Jibo can dance

The social robot Jibo has added music playing to its repertoire. Jibo partnered with iHeartRadio. The Children’s Society launches natural-language chatbot for Facebook

The Children’s Society is trialing a new chatbot to engage with Facebook users interested in its fundraising events. It worked with digital agency Puzzle London to develop the bot and has begun a four-month trial to find out if supporters find it helpful. The bot, supports natural-language interaction as opposed to prompted choices. Supporters who have signed up to an event, or are considering doing so, can use Facebook to make inquiries such as ‘tell me where to set up a fundraising page’ or ‘have you received money that I sent?’

It has been programmed to answer about 50 questions to assist event fundraisers. If it is successful, the Children’s Society plans to roll it out to other areas such as volunteering or legacy giving. Tangent builds Facebook Messenger chatbot for Nails Inc.

Nails Inc. has launched a Facebook Messenger chatbot to help customers find a product, launched in time for holiday shopping. The Messenger bot was designed by creative technology agency Tangent.

Nadine Clarke, lead strategist at Tangent, said, “Chatbots enable brands to create experiences in what we believe is the next big interface: messaging. Through conversational UI and machine learning we’re able to facilitate connections between customer and brands through meaningful interactions which ultimately drive results.” TriNetX unveils natural language processing service to extract clinical facts from physician notes and clinical reports

TriNetX, a global health research network for healthcare organizations, biopharmaceutical companies, and Contract Research Organizations (CROs), announced the general availability of its Natural Language Processing (NLP) service. TriNetX’s NLP service extracts clinical facts from physician notes and clinical reports, links them with other Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data, and makes the combined data available for assessing study feasibility, protocol design, site selection, and subsequent identification of patients for clinical trials. The TriNetX NLP service is based on technology from Averbis, a text-mining and machine-learning company headquartered in Germany.

In addition to the structured data already available in TriNetX such as demographics, diagnoses, procedures, medications, labs, genomics, and deep oncology data, NLP provides access to data derived from clinical documentation including discharge summaries, radiology reports, pathology reports, and others that contain critical information that is important to more accurately identify candidates for a clinical trial. TriNetX’s NLP service mines unstructured data, such as measurements and observation on ECOG performance status for oncology, NYHA classification, Ejection Fraction, and Corrected QT Interval for cardiac studies. NLP also collects information from clinician notes for patients whose hospital medical records may be incomplete due to visits to multiple healthcare facilities. The extracted data is subsequently mapped to standardized clinical terminologies that can be analyzed by researchers using TriNetX Live. IntelligentWire monitors customer service calls, extracts key information for databases, and creates overall analytics

IntelligentWire monitors, records, transcribes and analyzes every customer service conversation and generates compliant records for business applications. IntelligentWire voice analysis looks for

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important information in live conversations and immediately alerts other applications, such as Salesforce, to take action. A developer can trigger workflows, query databases, or input data from the live conversation.

IntelligentWire analytics delivers the accumulated understanding from many thousands of customer conversations. IntelligentWire creates data that can be injected directly into CRM or other back-office systems. Mizuho Securities adopts NRI’s AI and speech recognition technology to reduce time spent on compliance Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has successfully integrated new technology into the call monitoring operation of Japanese investment bank Mizuho Securities. The integration was completed in November of 2017 following a successful proof of concept stage in 2016. The integration combines NRI’s speech recognition and AI technologies to enhance Mizuho’s processes for monitoring and analyzing communication between investors and sales reps, which are tracked for both compliance purposes and better customer care. Schroder Investment Management in Singapore launches online chatbot

Schroder Investment Management in Singapore has launched an online chatbot operating through Facebook Messenger to answer client queries and display requested fund management data. Built with local company pand.ai (LUI News, November 2017, p. 38), the beta release of Schroders GO is able to self-learn and answer complex questions, such as “Show me USD funds in Asia Pacific managed by Robin Parbrook.” The chatbot is available in English, but able to understand “Singlish.”

The bot also allows users to track and get the latest information on their preferred funds with a Watchlist function. Incentivized quizzes to help users deepen their understanding of investing are also part of the package as well as live market commentaries from the Schroders team.

The full version of Schroders GO is expected to be launched in early 2018. Minnesota’s Mall of America provides a chatbot to help with shopping

The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, is huge. The mall has introduced a holiday chatbot to help customer decide where to park and how to navigate the mall based on the stores of interest. Customers can ask the bot questions on Mall of America’s website, mobile app, Facebook page, or simply ask Alexa to plan ahead for their trip to the Mall. Then, while shopping, they can use it to learn about deals and events, ask directions or brainstorm ideas for gifts when they’re drawing a blank.

To develop the app, developers used the mall’s historical data about shoppers to understand their needs. They also analyzed communication with users on the mall’s Twitter and Facebook pages to get an idea of frequently asked questions and how human customer service reps responded to those questions. Singapore Airlines testing English chatbot

Singapore Airlines (SIA) has launched a chatbot Kris in beta for its customers. Kris will initially be made available on the SIA global Facebook page, and its website thereafter.

Customers will be able to chat with Kris via Facebook Messenger and receive assistance for pre-flight enquiries. Currently, Kris is trained to address conversational English enquiries related to baggage, check-in, online booking, and travelling with infants and children. The chatbot will be expanding its capabilities over time. Bangladesh’s Eastern Bank launches country’s first customer service chatbot

Eastern Bank Ltd has launched the country’s first natural-language chatbot to render faster services to clients. Through Facebook Messenger, the EBL Digital Interactive Agent will inform the

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bank’s customers about their accounts, credit cards, and prepaid cards as well as general service information. Viber and Twitter versions are planned. Elekta collaborates with Palabra to offer voice-enabled Electronic Health Record software

Elekta announced that it is collaborating with Palabra Apps to allow speech recognition to be integrated into Elekta’s MOSAIQ Oncology Information System, an Electronic Health Record (EHR). The integrated system has been installed in sites in North America and Australia.

When paired with Palabra, which can now be purchased from Elekta as an add-on, MOSAIQ becomes a voice-enabled EHR system. Palabra utilizes speech recognition and automation technology to expedite clinical operations needed for accurate and complete patient records.

Palabra allows MOSAIQ users to navigate using voice commands to create documents that can be dictated, approved, and transmitted within minutes of seeing the patient. These capabilities reduce the amount of time needed for data entry and other clinical tasks. Palabra users are currently creating 50,000 documents per month and each user routinely saves more than 125 hours of work per year, the company claimed. Mobile app for Swedish grocer Coop Sverige lets users compile a shopping list with voice commands

Swedish grocer Coop Sverige has launched a new function for its mobile app that lets users compile a shopping list with voice commands. Customers open a shopping list, press the microphone icon, and start saying the items they would like to add and the amount. The list can also be shared with other family members. Spokata delivers audio news summaries using text-to-speech technology

Spokata delivers audio summaries of real-time breaking, world, politics, entertainment, technology, and business news from over 100 US and international sources on iOS devices, desktop, and mobile web. The technology delivers audio streams using text-to-speech (TTS) technology. ReadSpeaker now supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language

ReadSpeaker now offers support for Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) for ReadSpeaker’s speechCloud API and Production API products. SSML is a standardized markup language for speech synthesis applications. With SSML, the user has more control over how the text is read by a text-to-speech engine, specifically the prosody of the speech. When activated in a speechCloud API or Production API account, SSML can be used to insert pauses/breaks of certain length, insert phonetic transcriptions, and switch voices and languages in the same text. XMOS enables far-field voice technology for Pegatron Martina smart speaker interface to Google cloud services

XMOS, a supplier of embedded voice and audio interface solutions, said that its VocalFusion voice technology has been selected by Taiwan’s Pegatron Corporation, which provides an electronic and computing Design and Manufacturing Service (DMS), for Pegatron’s new smart voice assistant Martina. Pegatron has a diversified product line, including desktop PCs, notebooks, tablet, smartphone, broadband, wireless systems, game consoles, networking equipment, set-top boxes, smart home, servers, auto electronics, and more.

The Pegatron smart voice assistant Martina, uses Google Cloud Services and natural language processing technology to support Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean languages. The XMOS XVF3000 voice processor deployed in the Martina unit uses Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) to remove playback audio from the microphone signal allowing users to barge-in and talk over the playback signal. Noise suppression and dereverberation technologies are used to remove unwanted noise and echoes in the captured signal. The microphone follows a voice as it moves around the room via beamforming.

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Sheetz to offer voice-activated food ordering through Alexa Convenience store operator Sheetz is now letting customers order through a new Amazon Alexa

skill. Customers who have a Sheetz online ordering account and an Alexa-enabled device can use the new Sheetz skill for Alexa. Ordering through the Sheetz skill for Alexa is now available at all of Sheetz’s 564 locations throughout the Mid-Atlantic.

“We could not be more excited to bring this next generation of innovation to our customers and industry,” said Ryan Sheetz, assistant vice president of brand strategies at Sheetz, in a statement. Aprima Medical Software partners with DocBuddy to deliver mobile workflow app

Aprima Medical Software, a provider of electronic health records (EHR), practice management (PM), and revenue cycle management solutions (RCM) for medical practices, announced integration of the Aprima EHR with DocBuddy, a mobile workflow solution powered by speech recognition that is tightly integrated with the Aprima EHR, to deliver more convenient and efficient provider documentation when using an iOS or Android device.

With DocBuddy, providers can dictate into any part of a patient note, whether they are in the office or on the go, allowing providers to efficiently insert macros of common phrases, diagnoses, and other objective findings into patient records in seconds, leaving the subjective fields to be filled out as needed with free-text speech recognition later. DocBuddy centralizes and streamlines access to medical records from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection.

“As soon as I began using DocBuddy in conjunction with my Aprima EHR, I was able to reduce my documentation time by more than 45 minutes a day,” said Kavi Sachar, MD, of Hand Surgery Associates in Denver. “I am now able to see more patients, which is a tremendous boost to our practice’s bottom line. The other physicians in my practice are experiencing the same results.” Indian-accented English TTS for Indian IVR provided by Go 2 Market India

Go 2 Market India, a cloud telephony solution provider, makes its automation more Indian by imparting the local accent to the text-to-speech in English-language IVRs. The company focuses on business calls for Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Go 2 Market India believes that foreign-accented English is difficult for the caller to comprehend and understand. The TTS conversion in Indian accents is integrated in the cloud-based IVR system of the company. For the companies who make routine outgoing calls, the TTS conversion is also designed in a cloud automated confirmation tool that manages outgoing confirmation calls of SMEs. Vonage continues international expansion with new Tokyo location

Vonage, a provider of business cloud communications, has announced the opening of its first location in Japan. The new Tokyo office is located at Business Airport Marunouchi, near Tokyo Station.

The company is not new to Japan. Existing Vonage customers in Japan include companies in the e-commerce, talent acquisition, and online ticketing platform industries, as well as the country’s largest real-time payment network, Paidy.

Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, provides tools for voice, messaging, and phone verification services, allowing developers to embed contextual, programmable communications into mobile apps, websites, and business systems. Nexmo enables enterprises to easily communicate relevant information to their customers in real time through text messaging, chat, social media, and voice. DeepIntent detects fake political ads

DeepIntent has launched a private beta of a new feature called Verified Ads that checks whether submitted political ads originate from a genuine, US-based advertiser. Founded last year, DeepIntent says ads handled by its platform appear on the sites of such publishers as The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN.

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In Verified Ads, the platform utilizes computer vision to process images, natural language text processing to analyze textual messaging, and machine learning to learn from previous examples what constitutes a political message.

If an ad is determined to be political, staff members and software check whether the advertising organization is a legitimate US-based entity by requesting and examining its Articles of Formation and determining whether email addresses, IP addresses, the post-click destination page and website domains belong to that entity. To pass muster, the domains and email addresses need to be owned and operated by the same entity as the one represented in the Articles. The entire verification process takes from 12 to 48 hours.

If the entity is authentic, the ad is rendered with a Verified icon, so users can hover over it and see such advertiser info as the registered entity name and the state where the advertiser is incorporated. A publicly available ledger also shows if the ad is authorized or financed by the candidate mentioned. Presumably, this inefficiency is moderated by the need only to examine a given ad once, even if it is delivered many times. Amazon Web Services to help build Open Neural Network Exchange

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the latest tech firm to join the deep learning community’s collaboration on the recently launched Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX). Facebook and Microsoft led the effort.

As part of that collaboration, AWS made its open source Python package, ONNX-MxNet, available as a deep learning framework that offers application programming interfaces across multiple languages including Python, Scala, and open-source statistics software R.

Facebook and Microsoft this summer launched ONNX to support a shared model of interoperability for the advancement of AI. Microsoft committed its Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe2, and PyTorch to support ONNX. Initial versions of ONNX code and documentation were made available on Github. Panopto education video platform adds Virtual Reality support and multi-language speech recognition

Panopto has added new capabilities to its video education platform, including support for 360-degree and virtual reality video and speech recognition search support in nine languages. The new release lets users upload footage from 360-degree cameras and watch it using the company’s updated video players or virtual reality headsets such as Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.

The enhancements to Smart Search, the company’s “inside-video” search technology, S uses speech recognition, optical character recognition, and optional human captioning to index every word spoken and shown within videos. This helps users search across videos to find and fast-forward to the precise moment a word is mentioned in any recording. Smart Search now supports eight languages in addition to English: Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, and Polish. Authentication for meeting management tool uses authentication employing in part ambient noise

Switzerland-based Sherpany and Futurae are collaborating with the goal of giving executive committees quicker and easier access to a meeting management tool. Sherpany provides digital boardroom solutions, and they will add authentication from Futurae to control access to these critical meeting documents. Futurae minimizes the hassle of authentication with two-factor authentication, with one of the factors proximity between a user’s phone and the computer. Futurae uses audio and ultra-sound to prove the proximity between the phone and the computer.

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Futurae’s core product is SoundProof, a two-factor authentication solution said to work without user interaction. The technology uses a machine learning algorithm to securely authenticate the user via ambient noise. Advice on building voice experiences from Ahmed Bouzid, Alexa’s former head of product

Ryan MacInnis, Director of Marketing, Voysis, interviewed Ahmed Bouzid, the CEO of Witlingo and former Head of Product for Amazon’s Alexa. Voysis has launched a voice commerce platform supporting speech recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language processing (LUI News, December 2017, p. 21). Witlingo specializes in delivering products and solutions for emerging voice- and text-based conversational platforms.

A summary of some of Bouzid’s advice: § The voice interface is here to stay. It’s similar to smartphone adoption 10 years ago. “The

consequence of not investing is huge, so you need to build a team around that investment.” § Launching a voice experience is like launching a mobile app or new product feature; it demands

the same attention. § Try it yourself—experiment with a device, e.g., building an Alexa skill. “Only when you test can

you see what customers really want, and continuously improve from there.” § The team should include a user experience (UX) researcher paired with a designer who

understands voice enough to shape research on the possibilities voice can have on a brand’s customers. The team should also have a product manager to oversee the launch and gather information from the UX researcher to understand the possible places they can take this.

§ Roll out a new feature to a small pool of customers who are beta testers. IC Realtime lets you find specific footage in a home security camera recording by a natural language search

IC Realtime has developed a tool named Ella to deliver smart searching to home security cameras. Ella is an AI-powered search engine that augments residential and commercial surveillance systems by tagging video using image processing and accessing that content with natural language search capabilities. The company says that finding video evidence of a car break-in can be as simple as typing the phrase “someone opening door of my car.” By typing “dog,” you can find out which neighbor is walking a dog and leaving behind evidence on your lawn.

The tool has other abilities that help scan an overabundance of video data. This includes identifying sections of the video where there is motion. A new type of neural network is made with memristors

A research team led by Wei Lu, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, recently published in Nature Communications a paper on a new type of neural network made with memristors that they say can dramatically improve the efficiency of teaching machines to think like humans. A memristor is an electrical component that limits or regulates the flow of electrical current in a circuit and remembers the amount of charge that has previously flowed through it. The network, called a reservoir computing system, is claimed to predict words before they are said during conversation, and help predict future outcomes based on the present.

Reservoir computing systems, which improve on a typical neural network’s capacity and reduce the required training time, have been created in the past with larger optical components. However, the Michigan group created their system using memristors, which require less space and can be integrated more easily into existing silicon-based electronics. Intelligent Voice launches PCI redaction and transcription application for Zendesk support

Intelligent Voice has recently launched a new Payment Card Industry (PCI) redaction and transcription application for web-based help desk service Zendesk. Intelligent Voice’s app will

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prevent the storage of sensitive payment information in a Zendesk Support account. The app is available for purchase via the Zendesk Marketplace.

Once installed, the Intelligent Voice app will automatically detect and redact credit card data from call recordings. The app also produces a transcription of all calls.

Statistics and Surveys CNBC finds that audio content delivered through voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant has been popular

After promising levels of its audience returned each week to use its Amazon Alexa skill, CNBC’s global ad sales team will start selling audio sponsorship packages to advertisers in the next few months, according to a company announcement. The company said its voice audience across Amazon and Google has doubled since January, though the company did not provide absolute numbers. When people interact with skills they are apparently loyal: CNBC said audio audiences are the second most loyal behind those on its iOS and Android app.

CNBC has created content for Alexa-powered devices in the US since November 2016. In December, CNBC International launched an Alexa flash briefing for audiences in Europe and Asia.

Next year, CNBC will attempt to generate more audience growth by promoting its voice assistant offering through CNBC’s other channels and creating a revenue model without compromising the user experience. Conversational User Interfaces a key trend in creating a compelling user experience in 2018, according to Strategy Analytics

The User Experience Innovation Practice (UXIP) at Strategy Analytics has published “10 Trends for Creating Compelling User Experiences in 2018.” Report findings include that conversational User Interfaces –including chat bots—will emerge strongly in 2018, providing a more engaging user experience.

Paul Brown, Director, UXIP and report author commented, “Understanding how devices are connected with each other and how they are used in context will be the key to defining the next generation of experiences that will drive greater adoption, usage, and customer satisfaction.”

Kevin Nolan, VP, UXIP, added, “Simplifying and enriching the user experience through adaptive intelligence and context awareness will be the key to winning the battle for the customer.” Smart speakers: Amazon leads the market, but Google is improving its share

According to Strategy Analytics, the rate of adoption of smart speakers continues to defy expectations, and there are clear signs that the market is starting to move from the early adopter phase to hitting the mass market. Furthermore, the Chinese market for smart speakers will receive a kick-start in Q4 thanks to aggressive pricing and promotions around Chinese Singles’ Day for devices from Alibaba, Xiaomi, and JD.com as well as the launch of Baidu’s first Duer OS speaker.

Key findings from Strategy Analytics latest smart speaker quarterly report include: § North America dominated sales of smart speakers in Q3 2017 with nearly 75% global share,

although growth in Western Europe and Asia Pacific will reduce that share in Q4. § Amazon Alexa operating system fell to 69% share of smart speakers in Q3, down from over 80%

in the first half of 2017 as Google Assistant made strong gains following the launch of Google Home in a greater number of territories.

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§ The Chinese market started to show shoots of growth in Q3 driven by new device launches from Alibaba and Xiaomi although JD.com with its Dingdong speaker remained the top-ranking brand in China during the quarter.

David Watkins, Director of the new Smart Speaker service at Strategy Analytics, commented, “The competitive landscape will heat up even further in 2018 and we expect to see the introduction of a new wave of third party devices that support one or even both of the Alexa and Google Assistant voice AI platforms. All of this activity will of course pile more pressure on Apple whose own Siri-based HomePod speaker failed to materialize in time for the holiday season and will now make its debut in 2018. Apple is falling well behind Amazon and Google in the AI and virtual assistant race and its famed ability for hardware innovation may not prove enough to counter the fast-paced AI-software innovation of its rivals.” Financial analyst predicts Amazon will earn an additional $10 billion in Alexa-related retail sales in 2020

RBC Capital Markets is bullish on Alexa’s prospects to add to Amazon’s financial results, following a recent survey of Alexa products. “Following our third annual Alexa survey, we are more impressed with the traction of these devices and more convinced of their potential long-term impact,” analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients on Dec. 20. “With tens of millions of users and 20,000+ skills, we see Alexa’s value prop as becoming increasingly powerful, as awareness and ownership ramp.”

Based on the survey, RBC said that awareness about Amazon and Alexa has jumped to 89% over the past nine months from 77%. And 15% of survey respondents said they owned an Alexa-enabled smart speaker. As a result of a growing awareness for Alexa products, the analyst said Amazon will earn an additional $10 billion to $11 billion in Alexa-related retail sales in 2020. More than 20% of US broadband households plan to buy a voice-controlled smart speaker with personal assistant in 2017

Parks Associates announced new research showing 22% of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a voice-controlled smart speaker with personal assistant in 2017. “It’s still early days for the voice-first market, but rapid early adoption of products like smart speakers with personal assistants, at 12% of U.S. broadband households by year-end 2016, demonstrates the need and demand for a natural and easy-to-use interface,” said Dina Abdelrazik, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “Natural language processing for voice technologies happen in the cloud, so real-time updates can be made quickly once consumer realities unfold. Multiple channels, from custom to direct-to-consumer retail, will focus on expanding the voice-enabled UX in 2018.” Owners of voice-enabled speakers more willing to listen to advertisements if asked first

Call tracking and analytics firm Invoca surveyed US voice-enabled speaker owners, asking them what factors would make them willing to listen to ads delivered through their devices. Thirty percent said they would entertain ads via voice assistants if they were simply asked if they wanted to hear one before it played. In addition, 28% were open to ads if they got to choose the brands doing the advertising. One-quarter of respondents were willing to listen to voice assistant ads customized for them.

Invoca’s survey found that nearly nine in 10 people who had a voice assistant talked to it every day, while one-third said they used it more than five times per day. Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, mostly on their smartphones

Voice-controlled digital assistants are being incorporated into a wide range of consumer products, and 46% of U.S. adults say they now use these applications to interact with smartphones and other devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring. Voice assistants are present on a wide range of devices, but the most common way for Americans to use them is on a

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smartphone: 42% of U.S. adults use voice assistants in this way. Some 14% of the public has used a voice assistant on a computer or tablet, while 8% say they use them on a stand-alone device such as an Amazon Echo or Google Home. These applications are relatively popular among those aged 18 to 49: 55% of Americans in this age group say they use voice assistants, compared with 37% of those 50 and older.

Presented with a number of reasons why they might use voice assistants, 55% of users say, “a major reason” they use the assistants is that these applications allow them to interact with their devices without using their hands. Smaller shares say that they use voice assistants because they are fun (23% cite this as a “major reason”), because speaking to the assistant feels more natural than typing (22%), or because these programs are easier for children to use (14%).

Voice assistants can also be used as remote controls of other connected systems such as car locks and home lighting and heating systems. About a quarter of voice assistant adopters (26%) say they use the assistants to connect remotely to other things.

Asked about the performance of the assistants, a majority of users say they accurately respond to their commands most (39%) or some (42%) of the time. But 16% of users say that these assistants accurately respond to their commands “not very often.”

The survey also asked Americans who say they do not use voice assistants about their reasons for not using them. Some 61% of these non-users say they are just not interested in the tool. Around one-quarter of this group say they do not use voice assistants because none of the devices they own have this feature (28%) or because they are concerned about privacy (27%). And a slightly smaller share (18%) reports that voice assistants are too complicated to use. Messenger chatbots have a 98% open rate

A Chatbots Magazine article written by the company Olyo, which provides a platform supporting Facebook Messenger chatbots, performed research on the effectiveness of company Messenger chatbots using their platform. The company developed a “rudimentary” version of Olyo and sent the same campaign to users using both a Messenger bot and email. The CTR (click-through rate) was 12 times higher for the bot than the one obtained by e-mail, and the opening rate was 98%.

Since Facebook opened Messenger APIs, over 100,000 chatbots have been created. Olyo said. A final version of Olyo is in beta-testing. It allows brands and companies to create their own

Messenger bot. Comparing Messenger bots to email marketing, Olyo notes

§ Through a Messenger bot, users can request information and obtain an instant answer, allowing dialog.

§ Through Messenger you have conversation history, while emails are individual, so it is likely a user may not see all communication messages that have been sent.

§ Emails often end up in secondary folders such as spam, and the user usually does not get push notifications. With Messenger, users will receive notification.

§ With Facebook Messenger, you don’t need to set up the message screen. The content will be correctly displayed on all mobile and desktop devices.

TV manufacturers turning to the user experience to motivate buyers A new Market Snapshot from Parks Associates finds that makers of smart TVs and streaming

media players are shifting strategies to focus on the user experience (UX) as device sales start to flatten out. The report indicates that 45% of U.S. broadband households have a smart TV, which is now the most commonly used platform among US broadband households for accessing online video content.

Samsung recently announced it has integrated Amazon Music into its smart TVs, one of the first third-party non-Alexa devices in the US to stream Amazon Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. Samsung also announced an app for YouTube on its 2016 and 2017 models. In late 2017,

LUI News January 2018 45

Philips partnered with Roku to launch a line of smart TVs that use Roku’s platform, which simplifies remote control and content navigation.

The Market Snapshot also notes consumer demand is pushing voice into the connected entertainment area. Over 50% of U.S. broadband households find voice control appealing for entertainment and smart home devices, and voice control for all devices, including TVs, security systems, and appliances, scores well among consumers when testing use cases.

“Voice recognition and control are enabling entertainment equipment manufacturers to improve the user experience. An emphasis on a voice-enabled UX will be a key trend in connected CE for 2018,” said Dina Abdelrazik, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “In 2016, U.S. consumers bought an estimated 14 million voice-controlled smart speakers with personal assistants, and companies such as Roku, TiVo, and Comcast have debuted voice-enabled remote controls. We expect to see more voice innovations in streaming services and connected platforms at CES this year.” Deep Learning for NLP, advances and trends in 2017

A posting, Deep Learning for NLP, advancements and trends in 2017, by Javier Couto of Tryolabs, gives a good summary of some developments in 2017 using deep neural nets for natural language processing. Tryolabs is a consulting firm supporting projects in machine learning, NLP, data mining technologies, and more. More than half of current users of intelligent voice assistants believe that we will use body language, expression, intonation, and touch to interact with tech devices

Ericsson’s ConsumerLab issued the seventh edition of its annual trend report, The 10 Hot Consumer Trends for 2018 and beyond. The report points to a paradigm shift as consumers expect digital technology to increasingly operate on human terms. Body language, facial expression, and intonation are expected to augment voice and touch to control consumer interaction with tech devices, more than half of respondents expecting such features. The top trends discuss features wanted by users, but may in many cases be impractical. For example, 52% of respondents want to block out a family member’s snoring. And 40% say they would like a robot that works and earns income for them, perhaps a new take on automation replacing jobs. Face ID a popular feature on the new Apple iPhone, but sales of the iPhone X may be slower than anticipated

Analyzing early adopter reviews of Apple’s iPhone X from major online retailers, a new report from the Consumer Sentiment Analysis (CSA) service at Strategy Analytics found that its camera is the major driver among positive ratings. In particular, the front-facing camera which allows Apple’s new security feature, Face ID, is a key market differentiator.

Consumer sentiment for the display and battery is also positive. Around 80% of reviews for these core features are positive.

But investment firm Cowen and Company claimed in a note to customers that consumers are purchasing more of Apple’s cheaper iPhone models, avoiding the $999 iPhone X, as wait times for the iPhone X have dropped from several weeks to a few days since its November release.

Instead of going for the iPhone X, consumers are purchasing the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. These models are around $300 cheaper, but don’t have the X’s Face ID security system. Even less expensive, last year’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are still available, and start at $549. Many businesses handle sales leads poorly

Conversica, which provides conversational AI for business, announced the release of the 2017 edition of its Sales Effectiveness Report on Lead Follow-Up. The research report concluded that many sales teams are missing best-practice targets for following up effectively with incoming inquiries and that an increasing number of companies completely ignore their most valuable sales leads.

LUI News January 2018 46

Researchers made multiple visits to the websites of 866 companies across 13 industries and asked to be contacted, presenting themselves as the hottest of sales leads. They found that: § 38% of the companies contacted did not respond at all to a direct and specific sales inquiry,

worse than last year’s performance. § Of those companies that responded, 63% gave up after only one or two tries, a number similar to

the prior year. § Only 13% of responding companies did so within five minutes—a 29% backslide in promptness

compared to last year’s findings. § Companies continued to show improvement in personalization, with more than 72% of

companies achieving an “A” grade in the category. § Seven out of 13 industries investigated had no companies that received an overall “A” grade,

including brokerage/investment, insurance, real estate, advertising/marketing, manufacturing, media/publishing, and HR/recruiting.

Conversica provides AI-driven lead engagement software for marketing and sales organizations, in part through its Conversica AI Sales Assistant (LUI News, November 2017, p. 36). The Conversica Sales Assistant follows up with leads and contacts from CRM and marketing automation systems like Salesforce. The assistants use a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to carry on human-like conversations with leads to qualify them for sales.

Financial Notes Amazon growing Alexa AI fund by $100 million for global expansion

Amazon’s Alexa Fund was launched in 2015 as a venture capital program designed to invest in companies who want to innovate in terms of voice-based interactions. The program has invested in more than 30 companies across a wide variety of market areas including automotive, wearables, mobile computing, and smart home segments.

In late November, Amazon announced it will invest an additional $100 million in its Alexa Fund. The company is now targeting additional investment opportunities internationally. The new investment was apparently prompted by the level of interest into the fund shown by startups outside of the US, with Amazon revealing that its Alexa Prize challenge to build a conversational bot has received applications from 22 different countries.

In addition, startups from more than 50 countries outside of the US have recently applied for the Alexa Accelerator program. The Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars, is a startup accelerator created by the Alexa Fund. (Techstars is a worldwide network aimed at helping entrepreneurs succeed.) The initial class of 9 companies recently completed a 13-week program during the Accelerator Demo Day, meeting with investors and presenting their companies to selected members of the public. Cisco’s John Chambers invests in speech analytics Indian startup Uniphore Software

Uniphore Software Systems, an India-based speech recognition solutions provider (LUI News, June 2017, p. 14), has offices in India, Singapore, and UAE with about 100 employees. The company offers speech analytics product auMina and virtual assistant product Akeira to over 70 enterprise customers.

Cisco’s Executive Chairman John Chambers has acquired 10% equity in the firm as an individual as part of the Series B round of funding of an undisclosed amount that saw participation from existing investors, including IDG Ventures. Chamber will also take up the role of Uniphone’s “Chief Guru,” a role especially designed for him.

LUI News January 2018 47

“I am a big believer in India and its potential for producing globally relevant startups like Uniphore. The company was able to foresee the growing need for deep technology in the area of speech recognition and has innovated ahead of the market to capture this significant opportunity,” Chambers said making the announcement. DigitalGenius raises $14.75 million Series A for natural-language customer service solution

DigitalGenius announced a $14.75 million Series A, led by Global Founders Capital. The investment brings the total the company has raised to $26 million.

The company’s product is said to use machine learning and natural language processing to build a lexicon of common customer service interactions for each business based on old text and email interactions. It uses this analysis to support natural language chat (see example in image). Customers include KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Unilever, Eurostar, and Soylent.

A customer service representative can work with DigitalGenius technology to form a human-technology team. The technology can take the interaction as far as possible before passing off to a human or it can work with the human, offering responses and allowing the customer

service representative to customize the response before sending the email or text.

Horizons Ventures backs AI startup Fano Labs

Horizons Ventures has backed Hong Kong startup Fano Labs with an undisclosed amount. The company provides speech recognition, claiming to handle many dialects. Founded by academics, Fano Labs uses speech recognition and NLP to process recorded call center agent interactions with customers and provide analytics.

Initially, the startup is focused on developing its speech recognition technology for more Hong Kong and Mainland China dialects. It can currently handle Cantonese, Sichuanese, English, and Mandarin, and its clients include property developers, utility companies, and hearing aid companies. Verint acquires Next IT

On December 19, Verint Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT) announced that it has acquired all of the outstanding equity interests in Next IT Corporation and its affiliate Next IT Innovation Labs (“Next IT”), a developer of conversational virtual assistants. The purchase price consisted of close to $30 million of cash paid at closing, plus potential additional future cash payments.

Dan Bodner, CEO, Verint, said, “We continue to execute our innovation strategy, including making acquisitions that expand our self-service portfolio, accelerate Verint’s cloud and automation capabilities, and are accretive to earnings. We believe that Verint’s ongoing innovation in artificial intelligence technologies—such as machine learning, robotics and natural language processing—positions us for accelerated growth by helping organizations modernize their customer engagement operations with greater automation.”

Verint provides analytics solutions with a focus on customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk, and compliance. Today, over 10,000 organizations in more than 180 countries—including over 80% of the Fortune 100—are customers.

LUI News January 2018 48

Veritone acquires assets of machine learning firm Atigeo Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ: VERI), a provider of cognitive solutions (p. 20), announced it has

acquired the advanced data analytics software and related intellectual property assets of Atigeo Corporation. The acquisition includes a cooperative distributed inferencing system—based on Hamiltonian models and other proprietary algorithms—that enables queries within large bodies of unstructured data where straight computational machine learning and manual approaches are impractical, according to Veritone. The software features a self-adapting and self-learning design and is particularly effective in applications with large-scale heterogeneous data sets, strict rules, and the need to make near real-time decisions.

Chad Steelberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Veritone, said, “We are very excited about the addition of Atigeo’s proprietary machine learning capabilities to our growing body of technology and intellectual property in data science, which is a key area of focus for Veritone. We plan to incorporate portions of Atigeo’s technology into Veritone aiWARE, which will further advance our intelligent orchestration of cognitive engines and expand the platform’s understanding of all data types.” Replika raises $6.5 million for its personal chatbot

Replika claims to provide an “AI confidant,” a chatbot that works as the antidote to the increasing feeling of alienation associated with social media. The company indicated it recently opened up its AI confidant to a waitlist of more than 1.5 million users. Replika is available for iOS and Android, and is free.

Replika announced on November 30 that it has raised $6.5 million in a Series A.2 investment led by Khosla Ventures, Sherpa Capital, Phil Libin (co-founder of Evernote), and Richard Socher (chief scientist at Salesforce). The latest round, which brings Replika’s total funding to $11 million, will be used to improve the technology, expand the user base, and further develop the chatbot technology.

Sven Strohband of Khosla Ventures, said, “Since Replika became available, users from around the world have embraced the chance to engage with their own AI version of themselves, but also to test out this promising tool for self-reflection, digital journaling, and ultimately getting to know yourself better. The positive response to Replika goes to show how much of an impact this is having.”

The most dedicated users have described their Replika as anything from a close friend to a non-judgmental sounding board that is available to talk anytime, day or night. Users say that it helps them organize their thoughts, lets them step back to assess a situation, and ultimately appreciate benefits akin to those they might experience from keeping a daily journal. Egypt’s Elves, the digital assistant that isn’t digital, raises $2 million

Elves, Egypt’s “Human Siri” that connects people to real assistants, announced the closing of its seed round at more than $2 million.

People Nuance Communications appoints Laura Kaiser to its Board of Directors

Nuance Communications announced that after a comprehensive search, Laura Kaiser, President and CEO of SSM Health, one of the largest integrated healthcare delivery systems in the US, has joined its Board of Directors. The Board’s unanimous decision to elect Ms. Kaiser was made on December 19, 2017 and her appointment was effective immediately. Ms. Kaiser’s appointment

LUI News January 2018 49

expands Nuance’s Board of Directors from seven to eight members, and she will serve as the seventh independent director.

Ms. Kaiser has more than 30 years’ experience in the healthcare industry. In her role as President and CEO of SSM Health, she currently oversees 20 hospitals, more than 60 outpatient care sites, two nursing homes, comprehensive home care and hospice services, a pharmacy benefit company, and an insurance company. Prior to joining to SSM, she served as the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Intermountain Healthcare.

Healthcare is Nuance’s largest business, serving more than 10,000 organizations and 500,000 clinicians worldwide, according to a company statement.

For Further Information on Companies Mentioned in this Issue

Company Location Business Contact info 66 Audio Culver City,

CA Wireless headphones www.66audio.com

Adobe Systems San Jose, CA

Software solutions www.adobe.com

AI Index — Data resource for AI https://aiindex.org Alibaba Group China E-Commerce www.alibaba.com Amazon Seattle, WA Product sales on the Web, Echo,

and Alexa digital asst. www.amazon.com

Amazon Music Seattle, WA Music service www.amazonmusic.com Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Seattle, WA Technology infrastructure platform in the cloud

http://aws.amazon.com

American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)

Chicago, IL Ethicaluseofqualityhealthinformation

(312)233-1100; www.ahima.org

American Medical Association

Chicago, IL Industry organization www.ama-assn.org/ama

Ant Financial Services Group

Hangzhou, China

Financial services www.antfin.com

Apple Cupertino, CA

Personal computers, mobile phones

www.apple.com

Aprima Medical Software Dallas, TX Electronic Health Records www.aprima.com Archant Norwich,

UK Publisher www.archant.co.uk

Artificial Solutions Stockholm, Sweden

Virtual assistant development tools

www.artificial-solutions.com

Atigeo Corporation Bellevue, WA

Data analytics platform www.atigeo.com

Averbis Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Text-mining and machine-learning https://averbis.com/en/

Awrel Chestnut Hill, MA

Solutions for the dental market https://awrel.com

Baidu, Inc. Beijing, China

Web search in Chinese http://ir.baidu.com

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Seattle, WA Charitable foundation www.gatesfoundation.org

Booking.com (part of Priceline Group)

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Booking hotels and more www.booking.com

LUI News January 2018 50

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

CallMiner Waltham, MA

Speech analytics www.callminer.com

Campbell Soup Company Camden, NJ

Food products www.campbellsoupcompany.com

Cisco San Jose, CA

Internet infrastructure and IP telephony

www.cisco.com

CNBC Englewood Cliffs, NJ

News organization www.cnbc.com

Conversica Foster City, CA

Virtual sales assistant www.conversica.com

Coop Sverige Sweden Grocery chain www.coop.se Country Crock -- Cooking products www.countrycrock.com Cove Auckland,

New Zealand

Insurance services www.coveinsurance.co.nz

Cowen and Company NewYork,NY

Investment Bank www.cowen.com

Crop Science Society of America

Madison, WI

Industry organization www.crops.org

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Arlington, VA

Research support www.darpa.mil

DeepIntent New York, NY

Service detecting political ads www.deepintent.com

DeepMind Technologies (Google)

London, UK AI technology http://deepmind.com

DigitalGenius London, UK Natural-language customer service

www.digitalgenius.com

Dixons Carphone UK Electronics and telecommunication retailer and service provider

www.dixonscarphone.com

DocBuddy Greenwood Village, CO

Medical workflow solution with speech recognition

www.docbuddy.com

Domino’s Pizza Ann Arbor, MI

Pizza www.dominos.com , http://mobile.dominos.com

Eastern Bank Ltd Dhaka, Bangladesh

Bank www.ebl.com.bd

Elekta Stockholm, Sweden

Medical equipment and Electronic Health Record

www.elekta.com

Elves Cairo, Egypt

App that connects with human assistants

www.elvesapp.com

Equadex France Tools for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

www.equadex.net

Ericsson Stockholm, Sweden

Telecommunications products www.ericsson.com

Eurostar London, UK Railway operator www.eurostar.com Evernote Mountain

View, CA Note-taking mobile apps www.evernote.com

eXalt Solutions Boston, MA Cloud-based Knowledge-Based Sales Systems

www.exaltsolutions.com

LUI News January 2018 51

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

Facebook Menlo Park, CA

Social web service www.facebook.com

Fano Labs Hong Kong, China

Speech, natural language processing, and big data technologies

https://fano.ai

Fidelity Investments Boston, MA Brokerage services www.fidelity.com Flonase -- Allergy medicine www.flonase.com Ford Detroit, MI Automobile company www.ford.com Fortemedia Sunnyvale,

CA Fab-less semiconductor company with array microphone

www.fortemedia.com

Futurae Zurich, Switzerland

Mobile authentication solution https://futurae.com

Gartner, Inc. Stamford, CN

Information technology reports and consulting

www.gartner.com

GitHub San Francisco, CA

Code sharing https://github.com

Global Founders Capital Grünwald, Germany

Venture capital fund www.globalfounders.vc

Go 2 Market India New Delhi, India

IVR and Text-to-speech www.go2market.in

Google (part of Alphabet) Mountain View, CA, and Cambridge, MA

Voice and directory search, voice assistant

(650)253-0000; www.google.com

GreenKey Technologies Chicago, IL Telephony platform for global financial firms

http://greenkeytech.com

Gupshup San Francisco, CA

Bot builder platform www.gupshup.io

Hellmann's -- Mayonnaise and food spreads www.hellmanns.com HITLAB New York,

NY Medical laboratory www.hitlab.org

HomeAdvisor (ANGI Homeservices)

Golden, CO Service connecting with home improvement professionals

www.homeadvisor.com

Horizon Ventures HongKong,China

Venture capital fund http://horizonsventures.com

Huawei Shanghai, China

Telecommunications equipment and smartphones

www.huawei.com

Hulu -- Streaming video www.hulu.com Human Interact Champaign,

IL Game developer http://human-interact.com

Hyundai Motor Company Seoul, South Korea

Automobiles www.hyundai-motor.com

IBM Somers, NY Information systems and services www.ibm.com IC Realtime Pompano

Beach, FL Security cameras http://icrealtime.com

LUI News January 2018 52

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

IDG Ventures International collaborative group

Venture capital www.idgventures.com

iHeartRadio New York, NY

Web delivery of radio stations www.iheart.com

Incentro Netherlands Online service provider www.incentro.com/en ING Group Amsterdam,

the Netherlands

Banking www.ing.com

Intelligent Voice London, UK Phone recording search tool www.intelligentvoice.com IntelligentWire Seattle, WA Customer service monitoring www.intelligentwire.com Invoca Santa

Barbara, CA

Call tracking and analytics www.invoca.com

IP Integration Reading, UK

IVR solutions www.ipintegration.com

iQiyi (part of Baidu) Beijing, China

Online video platform www.iqiyi.com

JD.com China Web retailer www.jd.com Jibo Boston, MA Social robot www.jibo.com Khosla Ventures Menlo Park,

CA Venture capital fund www.khoslaventures.com

Kia Motors Seoul, South Korea

Automobiles www.kia.com

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Amstelveen, Netherlands

Airline www.klm.com

Korea Telecom (KT) Seoul, South Korea

Communications company https://corp.kt.com

Lexalytics Boston, MA Natural language tools www.lexalytics.comLibriSpeech — Speech database www.openslr.org LIGHTHOUSE -- Voice application supporting

diabetes sufferers https://lighthouse247.com

Linguamatics Cambridge, UK

NLP-based text mining www.linguamatics.com

Louis Vuitton Paris, France

Clothing www.louisvuitton.com

LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service, part of Microsoft Azure)

Seattle, WA NLP service www.luis.ai

Lum.AI Arizona Natural language processing technology

www.lum.ai

Lumin.ai -- Chatbots www.lumin.ai Macadamian Gatineau,

Canada

User experience design and software development

www.macadamian.com

Magic Machines AI Lab (part of Lexalytics)

Boston, MA Research partnership www.lexalytics.com/magic-machines-ai-labs

LUI News January 2018 53

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

Mall of America Bloomington, MN

Shopping Mall www.mallofamerica.com

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cambridge, MA

University www.mit.edu

Microsoft Redmond, WA

Various applications, products, and services

www.microsoft.com

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)

China Government agency http://www.miit.gov.cn

MIT Sloan School of Management

Cambridge, MA

Department of Massacusetts Institute of Technology

http://mitsloan.mit.edu

Mizuho Securities Japan Investment firm www.mizuho-sc.com/english/index

Mode.ai Palo Alto, CA

Visual shopping bot for retailers www.mode.ai

Molson Coors Denver, CO Brewery www.molsoncoors.com Mozilla Mountain

View, CA Firefox browser and other open source

www.mozilla.com

Nails Inc. London,UK

Nail bar chain https://us.nailsinc.com

Next IT Corporation Spokane Valley, WA

Automated customer service chat www.nextit.com

NICE Ra'anana, Israel

Multimedia analytics www.nice.com

Nomura Research Institute (NRI)

Tokyo, Japan

Financial services research group www.nri.com

Northern Light Boston, MA Machine learning platform for market research

www.northernlight.com

Northwestern University Evanston, IL

University www.northwestern.edu

Norton Rose Fulbright International

Legal services www.nortonrosefulbright.com

Novo Nordisk Bagsvaerd, Denmark

Global pharmaceutical company www.novonordisk.com

Nvidia Santa Clara, CA

Graphics chips www.nvidia.com

Oculus VR Irvine, CA Virtual reality headsets www.oculusvr.com Olyo -- Chatbot platform for Facebook

Messenger www.olyo.com

Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX)

-- Open-source project https://github.com/onnx

OpenAI -- Artificial Intelligence research http://openai.sourceforge.net

Paidy Tokyo, Japan

Online payment processing https://paidy.com

Palabra Apps, Inc. US Medical dictation system www.palabraapps.com Palette San

Francisco, CA

Diabetes support https://thepalette.io

Pand.ai Singapore AI solutions for financial services firms

www.pand.ai

Panopto, Inc. Pittsburgh, PA

Education video platform www.panopto.com

LUI News January 2018 54

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

Parks Associates Dallas, TX Market research www.parksassociates.comPegatron Corporation Tiawan Electronic and computing Design

and Manufacturing Service www.pegatroncorp.com

Pew Research Center Washington, DC

Research and surveys www.pewresearch.org

Philips (Royal Philips) Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Healthcare, lifestyle and technology products

www.philips.com

Plum Voice New York, NY

Customized IVR solutions www.plumvoice.com

Priceline Group Norwalk, CT

Travel web service www.priceline.com

PullString (formerly ToyTalk)

San Francisco, CA

Interactive chatbots https://pullstring.com

Puzzle London London, UK Digital creative agency www.puzzlelondon.com Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

San Diego, CA

Chips and wireless devices www.qualcomm.com

RBC Capital Markets New York, NY

Investment bank www.rbccm.com

ReadSpeaker (owned by HOYA)

Uppsala, Sweden

Text-to-speech software www.readspeaker.com

Reason8 Delaware, MD

Meeting recording and analysis www.reason8.ai

Reddit San Francisco, CA

Content discovery www.reddit.com

Reliance Industries Mumbai, India

Conglomerate www.ril.com

Replika (Luka) San Francisco, CA

Personal chatbot https://replika.ai

Research and Markets Dublin, Ireland

Research firm www.researchandmarkets.com

Roku Inc. Saratoga, CA

Streaming Media Player www.roku.com

Rubidium Ltd. Raanana, Israel

Embedded speech technology www.rubidium.com

Sabre Corporation Southlake, TX

Travel services www.sabre.com

Salesforce San Francisco, CA

CRM and sales support software www.salesforce.com

Samsung Electronics Seoul, South Korea

Wireless telephones and TVs www.samsung.com

Satisfi Labs -- Location-based intelligent engagement platform

www.satis.fi

Schroder Investment Management

Singapore Fund management company http://www.schroders.com/en

ScopeAI San Francisco, CA

Customer support analytics www.getscopeai.com

LUI News January 2018 55

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

Shanghai Shentong Metro Group

Shanghai, China

Operator of Shanghai Metro www.shmetro.com

Sheetz Altoona, PA Food service www.sheetz.com Sherpa Capital San

Francisco, CA

Venture capital firm www.sherpa.com

Sherpany Zurich, Switzerland

Digital meeting management www.sherpany.com

Singapore Airlines Singapore Airline www.singaporeair.com Skype (part of Microsoft) London, UK VoIP telephone service www.skype.com Slack San

Francisco, CA

Collaboration and communications platform

https://slack.com

Soil Science Society of America

Fitchburg, WI

Industry association www.soils.org

Somos Discovery Managua, Nicaragua

Virtual IVR and more http://somosdiscovery.com.ni

SoundHound Santa Clara, CA

Digital assistant, music identification and natural language speech interaction

www.soundhound.com; www.houndify.com

Soylent -- Food products www.soylent.com Speech Processing Solutions (Philips)

Vienna, Austria and Alpharetta, GA

Dictation solutions www.dictation.philips.com

Spokata -- Audio news service www.spokata.com SRI International Menlo Park,

CA R&D including speech and language technology

www.sri.com

SSM Health St. Louis, MO

Healthcare system www.ssmhealth.com

Stanford University Stanford, CA

University www.stanford.edu

Strategy Analytics Newton, MA Market research www.strategyanalytics.netSwanson (Cambell's brand)

-- Broth and vitamins www.campbells.com/Swanson

Symphony Software Foundation

Palo Alto, CA

Open source community for financial services

http://symphony.foundation

T2D2 -- Diabetes management www.t2d2.io Tableau Software Seattle, WA Data visualization software www.tableau.com Tack.ai Redwood

City, CA Sales support platform https://tact.ai

Techstars Boulder, CO

Support for entrepreneurs www.techstars.com

TelegentIP Austin, TX Automatic call distributor www.teligentip.com Telestax Austin, TX WebRTC platform www.telestax.com The American Society of Agronomy

Madison, WI

Industry association www.agronomy.org

The Children's Society London, UK Charity www.childrenssociety.org.uk The Soil Health Institute Northampto

n, MA Research institute www.soilhealthinstitute.org

The Tangent Agency Glendale, CA

Creative agency www.thetangentagency.com

Theraflu -- Cold and flu medicines www.theraflu.com

LUI News January 2018 56

Companies mentioned in this issue Company Location Business Contact info

Toyota Japan Automobiles and robots www.toyota.com TriNetX Cambridge,

MA Global health research network www.trinetx.com

Tryolabs San Francisco, CA

Machine learning consulting https://tryolabs.com

Ubisend Norwich, UK

Chatbots www.ubisend.com

Unilever New York, NY

Food, home, and personal care products

www.unilever.com

Uniphore Software Systems

Chennai, India

Speech technology www.uniphore.com

United Parcel Service (UPS)

Atlanta, GA Delivery service www.ups.com

University of Arizona Tucson, AZ University www.arizona.edu University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)

Amherst, MA

University www.umass.edu

University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI

University www.umich.edu

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Madison, WI

University www.wisc.edu

USAA San Antonio, TX

Financial services www.USAA.com

Verint Systems Melville, NY Customer service analytics and security solutions

www.verint.com

Veritone, Inc. Newport Beach, CA

Cognitive analysis of audio and video streams

www.veritone.com

Voicebox Technologies Bellevue, WA

Voice interface technology www.voicebox.com

Volkswagen Group Germany Car manufacturer www.vw.com Vonage Holmdel, NJ IP telephone service www.vonage.com Voxist France Virtual assistant for voicemail www.voxist.com Voysis Dublin,

Ireland Voice AI platform www.voysis.com

waze Mobile Palo Alto, CA

Navigation app www.waze.com

Witlingo McLean, VA Conversational interfaces www.witlingo.com Xiaomi China Televisions and digital devices www.mi.com/en XMOS Bristol, UK Array Microphone www.xmos.com Yeelight China Smart home products www.yeelight.com YouTube San Bruno,

CA Online video clips www.youtube.com

Zendesk San Francisco, CA

Web-based help desk software www.zendesk.com

LUI News January 2018 57

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Vendor Guide by Bill Meisel

Building Digital Assistants and Bots (400 pages, covering 274 vendors)

“Building Digital Assistants and Bots: A Vendor Guide” is a definitive reference to companies supporting the development of digital assistants. The guide can save you months of research, and help make choices that best support your goals. It is intended as a reference, with summary tables and lists that help you quickly find the resources that best meet your needs, along with discussions of the focus and strengths of 274 companies and their products.

Conversational Interaction Conference (IN ONE MONTH) (Organized by Bill Meisel for AVIOS) Feb. 5-6, 2018, San Jose, California

See program

Copyright TMA Associates 2017; All rights reserved. TMA Associates, P.O. Box 570308, Tarzana, CA 91357-0308 USA. Tel: (818) 708-0962. 295 LUI News (formerly Speech Strategy News) is published twelve times per year by TMA Associates, Editor: William S. Meisel. Trademarks mentioned in this publication are the property of the companies mentioned; they are used editorially. The material herein is based on data from sources believed to be reliable, but is not guaranteed as to accuracy and does not purport to be complete. From time to time, the author or TMA Associates may have consulting assignments, advisory positions, own stock, or have other business relations with organizations in speech recognition and associated areas, including companies discussed in this newsletter. LUI News is a trademark of TMA Associates.