Delving Deeper
Speak2web’s technology integrates into websites and mobile apps to make them accessible by voice. The company’s Simon virtual agent uses indexed data on a website to let visitors search for information or complete transactions with a conversation instead of needing to type and click. Simon uses IBM Watson AI as a base, with speak2web’s natural language processing system. Simon’s Natural Language Understanding is a cloud product that uses deep learning to extract metadata from text such as entities, keywords, categories, sentiment, emotion, relations, and syntax. IBM has partnered with speak2web to augment Watson with Simon to add features like conversation continuity and website controls.
Speak2web’s WordPress plugin adds speech technology to a web site using the popular WordPress platform. Among other uses, WordPress websites can incorporate forms and surveys into their audio features, letting visitors fill out information by voice. Speak2web also offers a universal voice search plugin for WordPress that is free on Google Chrome and supports 16 languages. The company indicated that their plugins for WordPress enable a company to deploy voice technology services to a website in ten minutes or less.
The voice assistant technology can integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, eCommerce, Knowledge Base, and other software. These integrations can prove beneficial to virtual agents for sales, support, and customer service on a website.
Simon maintains conversational dialog. It has been trained to know when it can ask questions to help people drill down to the best results. Simon will engage people via voice to help them filter results or take next steps in a process.
The basic search engines deployed to almost every website today try to match on a keyword alone. Cognitive search enables the search box to become not only voice activated but also to intelligently deliver optimized search results based on the context of the question a visitor asked.