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Sunday, May 12, 2019

Cisco Moves with MindMeld

Have we seen the emergence of a new general assistant?  I remember the acquisition of Mindmeld, but did not expect this direction.  Don't expect a device to follow,   but likely a business oriented conversational AI and assistance, with the ability to embed in other systems.   Smart homes?  There has been considerable posts about MindMeld in this blog.  Our innovation center did considerable work with Cisco.

Cisco opens up its MindMeld voice AI platform    By Maria Deutscher in SiliconAngle

Back in 2017, Cisco Systems Inc. shelled out $125 million to acquire MindMeld Inc., an early-stage startup that had created a platform for building voice assistants. The offering was one of the first development tools focused specifically on conversational artificial intelligence.

Cisco announced Wednesday that it’s releasing MindMeld under an open-source Apache 2.0 license. The move is meant to lower the adoption barrier for enterprises looking to add voice features to their applications. Just  as important, it will enable outside developers to improve upon to the platform and contribute their code back to the project.

MindMeld provides a set of tools that cover most of the core tasks involved in building a conversational AI. At the heart of the platform is a natural-language processing engine for parsing spoken commands. It can identify the topic a user is talking about, isolate what it is exactly they’re asking for and analyze “entities” such as restaurant names that require special interpretation.

Once a request is parsed, it’s passed on to MindMeld’s question-answering engine. The system can automatically generate replies by drawing on a corpus of information provided in advance by the application developer. MindMeld includes a dedicated module for managing a service’s knowledge repository that helps with tasks such as organizing data and finding alternative answers when an application’s first reply misses the mark..... " 

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