Gartner listed the topic among the Top 10 IT trends on 2016, and newspapers like The New York Times are picking it up in a more consumer-oriented way. Unfortunately, none of the existing systems, be it Apple Siri, Google Now, Amazon Alexa or Microsoft Cortana seem to perform in a way that really satisfies the user – at least not New York Times journalist Brian X. Chen. Only the (not yet publically available) Facebook assistant “M” appears to be capable of mimicking truly human-like behavior – which apparently is due to the fact that real humans rather than Artificial Intelligence alone are dealing with the requests the “system” gets form its users, which also means that response time is slow. Very slow.
So, why is it that multi-billion dollar corporations struggle to offer a seriously good performance with their VPAs? Like with so many things, we can only guess – but from our perspective, it’s a matter of the right basis from which those systems have developed. Unlike SemVox ODP S3, other systems rely on state-based dialog models that make it very hard to integrate a stable dialog model even in very complex situations dealing with natural language input. ODP S3 is goal-oriented rather than focusing on fulfilling certain functions, so the dialog is not depending on rigid menu structures. Also, apart from clever expressive semantic modeling and powerful ontologies, ODP S3 makes use of context factors to conduct a natural dialog and to support the user intelligently. These context factors include discourse memory, time, location, user model, sensory information, etc.
Apart from all these factors (and there are many more still!), SemVox ODP S3 also runs on virtually any platform like iOS, Android, Mac OS, Linux, Windows, QNX and so on. And imagine: it doesn’t even need an internet connection to work! ODP-S3-based solutions can run completely embedded, hybrid or cloud-based. What’s more, as an integrator, you’d be happy to work with a fully controllable platform and supported SDK you can rely on for a lifetime. There’s nor risk of unexpected fees or abandoned services. What if Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft decide to implement fees, restrict third party access or quit their solutions altogether? This will not happen with ODP S3 of course. Check out what ODP S3 is all about.