In a white paper a few years back, I proposed the Iterative Search architecture that used in conjunction with a Virtual Assistant would help feed the conversational dialogs when the Virtual Assistance was at a loss for an answer. (link to article)
It advocated three steps:
What are Solr and ElasticSearch? In 2010 Solr merged with the Lucene project, and ElasticSearch first release came out. In the years that followed, Solr became the preferred open source distributed search, mostly for unstructured text, while ElasticSearch team continued their parallel development. In recent years, ElasticSearch has surpassed Solr in new distributed search deployments for its ease of use and integration, and grouping and filtering capabilities. Both are active open source projects. Elastic is the company behind ElasticSearch, not to be confused with Amazon ElasticSearch Service. Why Solr / ElasticSearch? If you want to provide your Virtual Assistant platform customers the option to enable the Iterative Search step to the data flow, before returning an answer to the user, Solr or Elastic Search are two equally valid open source choices to implement the Iterative Search. Chatbots, digital assistants, virtual assistants are all based on a conversational user interface, and they are not all equally smart or conversational. Traditionally chatbots have been associated with conversational systems with a chat-like or messenger-type interface, while personal digital assistants in your device can translate speech to text, and do text-to-speech synthesis to read back responses to the user, and are more 'personal' in the sense that can help you do things more quickly, for instance, sending a text or setting a reminder in your calendar. Virtual Digital Assistant or Virtual Assistant is just a generic term for both. Virtual Assistants can differ in many of the steps in the following diagram, which depicts a data-flow that occurs after a user utters a question to the moment they get an answer. For instance, some Virtual Assistants are just Q&A chatbots and have a very limited dialog manager component, others may lack speech recognition or understand more than just the English language. In analyzing virtual assistants, these are some of the things they may or may not do:
I will be comparing some of the commercial virtual assistants in future posts and will use the above 10-point comparison list to highlight features or lack thereof. |
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