Two participants in Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference took the opportunity to announce a partnership that could profoundly improve the rate at which enterprise virtual assistants propagate in corporate settings. Openstream, a technology specialist founded in 1997, agreed to integrate language-neutral, natural language processing resources from Linguasys into implementations of EVA (Openstream’s enterprise virtual assistant). As a result, employees who turn to EVA to help organize their working life, will find it quick to learn and understand what they say, text or type, even if they’re are engaged in a conversation that spans multiple languages.

EVA is a mobile (rather multimodal) platform that simplifies delivery of apps and content within a business organization. At the highest level, it is the ultimate solution to every large company’s “bring-your-own-device” headaches because it creates a mobile portal (or rather a dashboard) through which each individual can gain access to the information (calendar, contacts, documents), applications and messaging resources by using the method that comes most naturally: voice, tapping, gesture or typing. It has hundreds of thousands of end-users at a broad spectrum of companies, including Thomson-Reuters, Walmart, BNY-Mellon, Novatis and others.

Linguasys has evolved into a provider of technologies that use semantic processing to understand each individual intent. Its most distinguishing aspect is that it is “language neutral,” meaning that once its engine has derived meaning from some input, it can render a response in 17 other languages. It is adding new languages, organically, as the market demands. Openstream expects the addition of Linguasys’ capabilities to reduce the time, effort and frustration involved in accessing enterprise resources from mobile devices. Together they will explore and implement solutions that include multilingual text analysis, sentiment analytics and fast, cost-effective natural language user interfaces.

Mass deployment of EVAs is provocative at a time when both CIOs (chief information officers) and CSOs (chief security officers) are finding it difficult to keep up with the plethora of highly personal devices and applications (not to mention operating systems and utilities) that employees “bring inside the firewall.” Much is made of the security dilemma this gives rise to, but not as much attention has been paid to the quality of each user’s experience as they succeed in making their favorite device into their “work machine.”

The idea of transforming a personal tablet, smartphone or phablet into an employee’s virtual assistant is provocative and it paves the way for IT departments and individual users to find common ground as new apps and combination of apps are delivered through a natural interface.

…and now (as Linguasys co-founder Brian Garr would say) “you get 16 more languages for free.”

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Natural Language, Linguasys, Openstream