Landscape of Conversational AI Platforms

In the recent Analytics Magazine from Informs, thoughtful look at this area:

The landscape of conversational AI platforms
How to choose the right platform for your business.
By Abe Raher

Vijay Ramakrishnan (photo, right) is the technical development leader of MindMeld, a conversational AI platform recently open-sourced by Cisco. Ramakrishnan develops the machine learning (ML) and information retrieval (IR) models in MindMeld, and architects conversational applications on top of the platform. Before Cisco, Ramakrishnan built conversational assistants for Fortune 500 companies such as Starbucks and Fast Retailing.

Georgian Partners defines conversational AI as “the use of messaging apps, speech-based assistants and chatbots to automate communication and create personalized customer experiences at scale.” Artificial Solutions describes it as “a form of artificial intelligence that allows people to communicate with applications, websites and devices in everyday, humanlike natural language via voice, text, touch or gesture input.”

Abe Raher, who writes technical documentation at AppDynamics, recently interviewed Ramakrishnan on the topic of conversational AI platforms and how to choose the right platform for particular business needs. Following are excerpts from the interview: 

Describe the conversational AI landscape.

The market is crowded. Players ranging from startups to blue chip companies now offer conversational AI platforms. I think of the major differences between platforms in terms of three tradeoffs: usability versus configurability, cloud versus on-premise and closed source versus open source.

“Black box”-type AI platforms abstract all the internals of machine learning (ML), which makes them easy to use and increases the speed to deploy a prototype application. By contrast, highly configurable platforms expose ML internals to the developer, which makes it easier to fix problems once an application is in production. For example, an application might misclassify some subset or category of queries. This is easier to address with a highly configurable platform, where the developer owns the entire ML stack, than with a “black box” platform.

Cloud-based AI platforms require training data to be uploaded to the cloud. For organizations whose customer data cannot be released to third-party services, uploading data to the cloud can be a deal-breaker. For them, it’s essential to find a platform that can be deployed on-premise, with all training data stored locally.

Platforms that are tightly coupled with consumer products tend to be closed source. The benefits of deep integration must be weighed against the disadvantages of closed source. For example, it might be easier to develop on the recommended AI platform as the device, but support might be limited, and since the code-base is closed, detailed introspection into the code to fix an issue cannot happen.

Open source platforms, meanwhile, are transparent due to their open code-base, so most issues regarding the platform have already been discussed, support is generally faster to provide due to the involvement of the open-source community and any further investigation of an issue can be done by introspecting the code. While evaluating open-source platforms, make sure to consider whether they have integrations to consumer or enterprise devices that you care about, and how vibrant their developer communities are.  .... "

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..... " 

Cisco Adds a Spark Conferencing Assistant

Said to be a result of Cisco's acquisition of MindMeld earlier this year.  Makes sense, now will it add a level of attentiveness to a conference and do supporting searches and create to-do lists?

With Spark Assistant, Cisco adds voice-activated A.I. to videoconferencing   By Matthew Finnegan 

Cisco envisions a phased rollout of Spark Assistant, a new service designed to end some of the pain out of setting up office meetings. ... " 

See continually updated and curated  list of virtual assistants.

Intelligent Voice Interfaces

From Mindmeld.  Registration information is required.

" ... Did you know predictions are that, by 2020, 50% of web searches will be done using voice queries? If you have an app or connected device that requires search functionality, naturally spoken voice search is rapidly becoming a must-have requirement.  In many cases, voice is the fastest and most natural way to interact with devices and applications for navigation, search and discovery, driving higher engagement and user satisfaction.

Download this whitepaper to learn how natural language voice interfaces are possible today using advanced artificial intelligence technologies that have been long in the making -- but are finally here!

Learn about:
The context of present-day voice-driven technology
The 4 main components of an intelligent voice-driven application ...  " 

Report on the Use of Voice Assistants

An interesting report on the increasing use of voice assistants.   Is this the interaction channel that will become common in the future.  By Mindmeld, a well known player in the space,  I am continuing to experiment with voice interfaces in the Smart Home.

User Adoption Survey Results Q1 2016

A new revolution is underway in intelligent voice assistants. We discovered this through market research conducted a few weeks ago. 2015 was a definitive year; our research suggests it was the tipping point of voice assistant adoption. The report is available here.

The implications of this trend are many and apply to everyone -- not just the vendors of intelligent voice assistants such as Siri, Amazon Alexa/Echo, Cortana or OK Google. Consumers are expecting intelligent voice interfaces across many devices and applications. To remain competitive in the app space, the growth of voice is important for all companies to heed.

In the words of Opus Research:  "As businesses create their roadmaps for technology adoption, companies that serve customers should be planning for, if not already implementing, both messaging-based and voice-based Conversational UIs."  ..... "  

MindMeld Platform

I see there have been a number of updates on the MindMeld Platform.    " .... The Voice Revolution has Arrived  A new generation of voice driven applications is now possible for the first time ... Recent AI Breakthroughs have cracked the code on Voice.   .... Thanks to massive data sets combined with recent advances in deep learning, human-quality speech recognition is now possible for most common languages and dialects. ... " 

Virtual Nurse, Professional Assistant

More from expectlabs.com,   Professional assistants.

MindMeld & Sense.ly Launch Breakthrough "Virtual Nurse" Solution

This week, MindMeld is thrilled to announce our partnership with the technology company Sense.ly and the launch of an innovative virtual assistant specialized in personal medical care and powered by artificial intelligence.

This solution does not come one minute too soon. In the U.S. alone, $3.8 trillion was spent on healthcare in 2014. Half of that unsustainable total is due to patients requiring repeated hospitalizations for the same unmanaged chronic conditions. Physicians agree that consistent medical monitoring and consultation would dramatically reduce costs. Unfortunately, the healthcare industry does not have enough resources to monitor patient health 24 hours per day.   .... " 

Expect Labs Mindmeld

Taking another look at Expectlabs. And their Mindmeld work.   " ... We are undergoing a profound transformation in how we interact with our devices. Today, users expect that the services they tap into are smarter than ever. Predictive technology satisfies this need by adding a layer of personalization — making each experience with our devices more meaningful. A new report from Business Insider: Intelligence shines a light on this development by analyzing a few of the services that are redefining personalization. Expect Labs is listed as a service that can help developers and marketers leverage this game-changing technology ... " 

MindMeld Again: Focusing Employee Work

Early this year I mentioned MindMeld,  which was meant to monitor your conversations and give helpful advice.  Now MindMeld is here as an App.  We looked to methods like this to help focus employee work.  The focus ended up being formed by focusing key available tools and required data.  The delivering that on a mobile App.    Adding an intelligent scan of communications would add another useful capability, but the semantic intelligence to do this well is still hard.   Technology Review gives it a mixed review.   Will give it a try and report on its applicability to this task.

Recall I also looked at Zakta as a solution.

Update: Read the comments on this App.  It is not what I had been expecting, to help provide work focus.  Appears to require Facebook.  Security an issue?  Still plan to take a closer look.

Give me a MindMeld

Brought to my attention from  Expectlabs.com.   Their system called MindMeld, initially designed to be delivered to the iPad, that will monitor conversations and construct tasks based its understanding of the interaction.  An 'always-on Siri?...' As stated  a very powerful idea, say for corporate knowledge capture.  But will this have the shakiness and reliability of Siri?    Apparently not quite yet available for test.  Be glad to test in real applications in Alpha.

" ... Our first release of MindMeld, available in the fall of 2012, supports high-quality, group voice calling on the iPad. Later this year, MindMeld will support high-quality, group video calling as well. In the near future, we expect to release versions of MindMeld for additional devices and platforms including Android.   MindMeld is powered by a unique technology platform that merges high-quality, real-time communication with state-of-the-art language analysis and information retrieval. We believe that this technology platform can serve as a useful foundation upon which to build a wide range of intelligent applications centered around real-time conversations. With this purpose in mind, we expect to open this platform to the developer community in the coming months.... "