2016 Finalists The AIconics are the world’s only independently-judged awards celebrating the drive, innovation and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community, wi…
Humley are proud to announce we have been shortlisted for two categories at the AIconics awards, Best Startup Success Story & Best Intelligent Assistant. We are one of seven businesses to be nominated in each category.
The AIconics are the world’s only independently-judged awards celebrating the drive, innovation and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community, with the winners announced exclusively at The AI Summit.
Digital, Virtual, Personal, Brand Assistants: How do they fit together?
By Ed Smith, Chief Product Officer at Humley
We’ve had digital assistants for some time; computer systems that take natural(ish) language commands and perform a useful task for the user. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we see two major shifts; natural language interpretation combined with machine learning. So, what does this mean for the landscape of digital assistants?
Before we look digital assistants more closely; let’s make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Narrow AI.
AGI is the stuff of science fiction, academic goals and (unfortunately) the general public perception of what AI can do. It is the idea that we can have an AI that can learn like a child learns, by observation rather than instruction and, over time build up a human-like ability to understand and interact with the broader world around it. We are not there yet, and this vision has a few years to go before becoming a reality.
Narrow AI is where we can instruct a system how to learn. To improve it’s ability in a narrow scope. It is AI, but the expectations are lower as we expect ‘new’ domain knowledge to be added through instruction rather than observational learning.
So let’s look at the landscape of assistants. There are two main types of AI assistants; Personal Assistants and Brand Assistants. A Personal Assistant is focused on providing a user with as wide array of useful assistance as possible. It may open an app, send a text message or schedule a meeting. Examples of Personal Assistants are Apple’s Siri product, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa. These companies are investing heavily to be the users Personal Assistant of choice. It is a subject for another blog, but it is interesting to note that Apple’s and arguably Google’s assistants are so closely tied to the underlying OS of the device they work on, they are not universal, whereas, Cortana and Alexa both attempt to be underlying platform agnostic.
A Brand Assistant is much more narrow and specific in scope. The idea is that a Brand Assistant will be able to help with a particular brand, service or product. It may not tell you the weather, but it can help you transfer funds from one bank account to another, tell you the current interest rates, and assist with other specifics to that brand, service or product. A Brand Assistant can have depth were the Personal Assistant has breadth.
It is unlikely that Siri will ever be integrated with all the banks in the world such that it can understand how to do bank transfers, or pay off your credit card, hence the need for both Brand assistants and Personal assistants. So how do the two work together?
If we see a Brand Assistant as being Narrow AI and the vision for Personal Assistants as being AGI we can make an interesting conclusion. Whereas the AGI technology is not ready, there are already products that are preparing for that time to come with brute force programming of Personal Assistants (Siri, Cortana et al). However, the Narrow AI technology is here and already adding huge value to customers while driving down the cost of customer engagement or support. As we look at Personal Assistants verses Brand Assistants, we can see that the vision of creating a Brand Assistant is not only realistic, but will also provide a strong ROI.
Shortly we will see Personal Assistants launch apps or other programs on request, and allow the Brand Assistant to take over. The Personal Assistant providing broad scope of assistance while the individual brand or service assistants providing the needed depth of capability to make this truly valuable to the consumer.
In many ways there are parallels for the the web: AOL, Yahoo, Altavista and others attempted to be personal web assistants, but the web became truly useful when brands started to build their own websites and own their part of the experience.
The significant investment taking place in San Francisco and Seattle to claim the prize of being your Personal Assistant is huge. The question is will brands, product and services be ready for the shift and have their own Brand Assistants ready?
What are the most important factors in creating a successful life-long relationship? Loyalty, trust, understanding, appreciation, the ability to make you laugh, being there when you need them? These traits are not limited to just human relationships, but apply further afield to the brands around us. After all, brands are in our lives nearly every day and if successful, they can form the basis of a long-term bond with us. We need them, and they need us.
A brand creating a bond with the customer starts the same way all relationships do; attraction, differentiation, affection and excitement. Brands need to demonstrate to their customers what makes them great, showcase their benefits in a way that targets and tailors the appeal to the individual customer. Brands need to portray their personality with transparency as a basis for trust to grow.
James Dearsley Interviews Humley on AI & Machine Learning
James Dearsley who focuses on innovation and technology has a passion to help the property sector understand what is coming next.
James interviews Humley to discover how we are harnessing cognitive computing to empower companies to access and implement an artificial intelligence platform within their businesses, whether this is to transform their customer service tools or business processes, or simply to enable the end-user to find and action solutions for themselves without the need or cost of human intervention.
How do brands communicate to their customers, when the customer owns multiple connected devices? Should the brand just send an email with some information and hope for the best? Or wait until the customer to becomes frustrated with the experience and attempts to contact the brand after searching their digital real estate?
The influx of multiple connected devices per customer means they expect a connected experience and should not have to search through even more real-estate for information. Brands need to provide a consistent and relevant cross-device conversation with their customers to maintain a customer relationship.
Effective communication with customers will start when it advances from simple information and FAQs, and into an estate of actionable solutions that cross devices. This will empower brands to carry their voice throughout the customers connected life and enable them to organically grow a relationship.
Humley’s Smart Assistant enables brands to deliver relevant and effective communication, by not only understanding the customers context (such as which device they are using) and providing a personalised experience, but by providing essential actionable solutions in a connected world.
We are looking for a Web Application (Tooling) Developer with a passion for creating intuitive user interfaces and automation, who wants to work at the bleeding edge of technology.
There is a lot of buzz around messaging engines opening up their platforms to Bots. Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik and Telegram to name a few. This enables brands to communicate through these platforms in the form of a Bot to their customers, but how does a brand go about creating their Bot personality to communicate with their customers?
To provide a Bot that holds any value, the customer needs to be able to speak in a natural language and the brand needs to be able to interpret this, potentially hold context of the conversation and then hold a dialog with the customer; sound simple? It's not. There is an assumption that the providers will handle this complexity and AI for you, however this is not the case. The messaging platform provider gives you the ability to receive and send a message. That's it.
This means the brand needs to implement AI capability internally to interpret natural language from their customers. This is done through the implementation of third parties or writing the AI themselves. Then what about language translation? What about identifying when your customers are angry? How do you know what conversations your Bot is having? How do you validate these conversations and fill holes when material is missing? The answer is more third party APIs and in-house built systems. This means investment in expertise and resource. Alternatively you do not use AI, and simply create a very structured paint-by-numbers user flows that has led to the less than useful, and often annoying Bots that we see today.
It's a great step that these platforms are opening up this access, but does the productize software exist to enable brands to fill this space without investing significant resource in the area of AI and systems to support it?
One thing that is for certain, as with previous technology we have seen in web, mobile web and apps, brands will need to fill this gap. Already just the 4 platforms in this article have access to over 1.2 Billion users.
Humley gives a simple integration mechanism for these AI technologies, while providing a platform that allows the material that powers it to be managed at scale. We can fill the gap in a cost effective way.
Customers access brands through more diverse channels than ever, and with this set to increase brands need their communication to be consistent, relevant and universal. By achieving cross-platform consistency and relevance, brands will deliver the optimal customer experience, ignite differentiation, create stickiness, and enhance customer satisfaction.
The broadening reach of our Humley smart assistant platform tackles this challenge and delivers contextually rich actions relevant to each specific platform, including; iOS, Windows, Android (including wearables), and now smart TVs.
Humley’s android TV SDK is another step towards a universal cognitive brand assistant.
Humley Introduces Natural Language Processing Layer
The Humley platform now has the ability to manage Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well as managing Corpora of data.
NLP further improves our ability to allow humans to interact with our platform in natural language. This is a layer that sits on top on the existing platform and combines with our technologies to enable us to provide answers with a greater degree of confidence as well as removing answers that the platform feels are less relevant, therefore providing a more accurate result set and experience to the end- user.
The layer is abstract meaning we can plug any number of machine learning providers into the platform. We have currently integrated IBM Watson's Natural Language Classifier and we are seeing great results!
This deployment moves us to a position where we can begin to expose our technology through bots.
As the big messaging players open up their technology to bots, businesses and brands will need a bot presence to fill this communication with their customer base. Humley fill this gap.
The bots are coming! Standby for a bot update over the coming weeks.
The world has turned into a connected one, and brands need to embrace this new era as the expectations of their customers evolve with this exciting technology. Customers look for the best experience, one that is connected, seamless and efficient, and brands need to fulfill these demands to stay competitive, no matter their industry.
That’s where our newly released wearable support comes in. We can now launch and deep-link into applications on wearable devices, allowing brands to not just provide answers to their end-user, but allows them to deliver actionable solutions in a connected environment.
This service enables brands to help their customers solve a multitude of end-user issues, from helping them learn how to use and control their wearable device, to enhancing their digital experience by directly opening apps, deep-linking, as well as notifying their wearable.
The Humley team are running a series of workshops and events at the IBM Watson™ offices in Astor Place NYC next week. Drop us a line if you would like to learn more about Humley’s Digital Assistant powered by IBM Watson™.
As we see the competition accelerate for natural language digital assistants, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Now; we need to appreciate that Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are listening intently to everything their customers (and let’s face it that means your consumers) are saying. That has huge hidden value.
Imagine, as a retailer or service provider you could listen into your consumers actual words; what they really thought of your products, what they really wish you would do as a service, and where the gaps were. As a product owner I know the task of trawling through usage data, market research, trends and blue sky sessions to understand what the end-user is looking for, and shape the best possible service and experience to give to them.
The virtual personal assistant is opening up a real-time and valuable new data source for understanding the end-user, and that is the customer voice itself.
Here at Humley we have launched the Humley Brand Assistant, a natural language personal virtual assistant that serves the needs of brands or services. End-users can use speech-to-text, or type in their question in their natural voice and native language, and using Machine Learning (ML) we interpret the request, add context, and serve an engaging and actionable answer with a resolution. Our goal is to build on the huge advances in ML to interpret natural language requests, and service them with contextually relevant and actionable answers. The fascinating side-product of our solution has been the wealth of information we can provide our partners, about what their consumers are actually asking for, what they want, where any potential gaps in knowledge are, or if any needs are not being met.
The question for any direct-to-consumer service provider, retailer, product manufacturer out there is; when will your virtual personal assistant launch? Or will you leave it to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft or Alphabet to listen to your consumers and build products to serve them better?
One thing small companies have in common with large organisations is the requirement and desire to deliver the most efficient and relevant experience to their customers, ensuring they are able to differentiate from their competitors and stand out as the brand that puts their customers first.
With this in mind, we would like to show you what we have been working on. The video shows a Beta version of our language detection capability within a widget environment, but this feature can be used within any digital space, from support centers, to digital assistants, to applications and many more.
After detecting the language of the end-user the service then responds in the correct language. Using our platform, our partners are able to deploy a single fully translated service, ensuring that their customers are always receiving an experience optimised and relevant to their language.
As a MEF (Mobile Ecosystem Forum) member, Humley will be attending the invite-only Innovation Meetup (part of the MEF Innovation Programme), an exclusive evening discussing and exploring the most exciting technologies in the Fintech industry.
We are delighted to be a part of this event, which explores innovative and next generation Fintech, bringing together mobile leaders, innovators, and disruptors, for an evening of business matchmaking, new opportunities, and Fintech acceleration.
Today we launch a new page on our website that provides an insight into our world, with who we are and what we are passionate about.
Haven’t heard of us? We are Humley, the subsidiary of the Infomedia Group, one of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK, who are utilising the cognitive computing power of IBM Watson™.
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