Steve O’Hear posted an interesting article about ChatGrape on Techcruch, an enterprise chat-based collaboration tool that looks similar to Slack. What was notable in the Techcrunch description was mention of the use of natural language processing (NLP) in ChatGrape. The system performs a linguistic analysis of words as you type and applies algorithms to categorize what you’re discussing with co-workers.

If the NLP engine notices that you’re mentioning dates and times, it might surmise you’re trying to schedule a meeting and it will show an “Add to Calendar” button. Assuming that you set up the integration with your calendar, clicking the button will pre-populate all the calendar fields for you and you can quickly save the meeting notice. That can come in quite handy for those of us that are sometimes too distracted or lazy to create a calendar hit.
Another example of the built-in assistance provided by the NLP engine relates to tasks or “to-dos.” If the NLP system detects a discussion that contains an action, it will add a “To Do” button. Again, you can click the button to set up a task in a system that you have linked to ChatGrape.

There are a myriad of third-party apps and bots for Slack that can automate pretty much anything. O’Hear cites ChatGrape co-founder and COO Leo Fasbender as expressing the opinion that such bots and slash-commands are too cumbersome for the less-geeky among us. He may be onto something, especially if chat-based collaboration apps are to spread beyond the DevOps crowd and up to the management suite.

Here at Opus Research we’ve been using Slack for a bit and have come to appreciate its ability to help us stay connected. I can envision how a more hands-on intelligent assistant, based on NLP, might help us remember to schedule meetings and the like. I wonder, though, if NLP-based assistance could become too heavy-handed, along the lines of an overreaching Clippy. We’ll be on the lookout for how the trend matures.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Collaboration, Natural Language, Slack, NLP