The thought of building a no-code platform for enterprise use cases came from the fact that building AI based conversational interfaces should be possible for anyone to create, like a content management system for AI interfaces. Being in conversation and interviews with our clients and several other experts in customer facing roles helped us outline 4 key areas of consideration:

Peak time is ‘Always On’ when it comes to customer service: Customers want answer to most of their queries seamlessly and as per their convenience without having a need to interact with a human. Even better, if issues can be fixed and queries can be answered just over a text.

Inability to solve issues can quickly lead to a bad reputation (since human tendency is to criticize than appreciate): Resulting in loss of customers to competition.

How to make the right choice: Back then, there were several bot building platforms available. But most of them did not focus specifically into training quality datasets for building smarter conversational agents.

Cost factor: It is not easy to build a NLP trained chat assistant for those who do not come from a technical background. Heavenly dependent on either having an in-house Machine Learning team consisting of engineers, data scientists, product team or they will have outsource the product entirely

Kontiki AI

We launched Kontiki AI, a machine learning start-up where we designed and built a SAAS platform called, Alter NLU that enabled anyone with or without technical know-how to develop Natural Language Processing (NLP) based conversational user interfaces. It was vertical agnostic and used the same concept of a Content Management System for conversational interfaces — a unique platform that allowed anyone to plug content from the web and build an NLP chatbot in a significantly short time and with less development effort. We also introduced an insights and analytics product ‘Anchor’, for the users to review bots’ performance and real-time analytics.

In Kontiki AI, we applied a 2 pronged approach - First, a custom development of any enterprise based solution with Anchor. Second, based on our learnings from the first approach for addressing the current gaps in other chatbot training softwares. Instead of reinventing the wheel of building yet another chatbot making platform, we wanted to narrow down our thinking further and focus on the core aspect of how might we make these conversational interfaces buildable, intelligent, and usable. That’s when Alter NLU was conceptualized.

What could ALTER NLU do?

The platform was developed to handle multiple agent datasets within a single user login i.e you can add training data for any number of agents. The main focus of Alter NLU is to overcome all the roadblocks involved in building a stable and good quality training data. To achieve the same, it is segregated into 3 parts: Intents - Intents help you recognize what your users want to say. Entity - Entities describe the piece of information you would want to extract from the expressions/messages of the user. It identifies ‘ things’ that your users mention. Reports on training dataset quality - The platform did not just help train the data, but also provided AI-based real-time ‘Reports’ where it listed out the issues and recommended improvements such as  an in-depth analysis and alerts for the intents and entities that need more training pointing out what exactly needs to be addressed. This helps in maximizing the accuracy of the agents’ response.Cost factor: It is not easy to build a NLP trained chat assistant for those who do not come from a technical background. Heavenly dependent on either having an in-house Machine Learning team consisting of engineers, data scientists, product team or they will have outsource the product entirely

Alter NLU packed user friendly and utility based features which also became its key differentiator in its beta version.

  • Natural language processing
  • Analytics dashboard & sentiment analysis
  • Intent & context recognition
  • Multi lingual support
  • Plug & play api integration
  • Free text search & guided flows
  • Speech recognition
  • Rich media support
  • Spell checks & casual talks
  • Cross platform & multi device support

Customization: Ability to contextualize and customize for enterprise use case

Supports Multiple Channels:
Alexa, Google Home, Web, FB, Slack, Skype, Twitter

Flexible & Modular: Interoperates with 3rd party tools
Modular – API based

Supports Multiple Channels
Through our studio, even business users can configure, train, and deploy bots

On Premise Deployment
Security – the data resides inside the organization firewall
Privacy – full control over data (can be used for training bots)
Interoperability – easier integrations with intelligent backend enterprise systems

Outcomes

  • Several products designed, developed, and deployed with a leading semiconductor organization as part of our custom development efforts.
  • Built the first ever NLP trained event assistant for Spike Asia, a marketing and advertising event in Asia Pacific.
  • Open sourced Alter NLU for the developer community.