On February 4th, speech-processing specialist Sestek completed an investment in Botego, acquiring 30% of the company. It signaled the beginning of stepped up efforts to develop and market solutions that combine Sestek’s automated speech processing assets with Botego’s natural language processing products and expertise.

According to company-supplied literature, Botego means “Bot with an Ego.” In its seven years of operations, it has distinguished itself as the only company, based in Turkey, offering a commercial product using NLP created for the Turkish language. Its main products include virtual agents, an automated email reply agent and tools that support document indexing and search as well as natural language search.

Botego can brag an impressive set of customers for these core products and services. They include Johnson & Johnson which employed Botego as the basis of “Ask Asli,” an artificial intelligence-base consumer chat line that fielded questions about O.B. tampons, a topic that J&J correctly believed its target customers might find to intimate or sensitive for live chat. Other customers include global brands like CocaCola, Fox and Lipton, as well as a number of domestic, Turkish firms like wireless provider Avea, TurkTelekom, DigiTurk and Finansbank. Together the two companies will expand their international footprint by adding languages and marketing efforts in the U.S. Botego has already opened an office in New York City. In addition to Turkish, Sestek’s platform supports English, German, Portuguese and a number of Arabic languages and dialects.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles

Tags: Natural Language, automated speech processing, personal virtual assistants