Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating topic for many people nowadays, no matter if they are a consumer or an influencer. Today, I’m happy to be joined by Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO and co-founder of Api.ai, a conversational UX platform used to embed natural language understanding capabilities into connected devices, apps and services. Regular readers of SitePoint may recognize the service, as we have covered Api.ai in the past with a series earlier this year on getting started with the platform.
Ilya has a background in machine learning, natural language processing and conversational interfaces.
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Elio Qoshi: Thanks for being with us today for this interview Ilya!
Ilya Gelfenbeyn: My pleasure.
Elio: We have covered Api.ai in the past, but could you briefly explain the concept behind it?
Ilya: Sure. Imagine having an actual conversation with a product, just as you would with a human. Api.ai is a conversational user experience platform for building natural language interactions for bots, applications, services and devices. The Api.ai platform lets developers seamlessly integrate conversational chatbots and intelligent voice command into their products and services. Developers can use Api.ai for speech recognition, context awareness, and conversational management to quickly and easily differentiate their business, increase satisfaction, and improve business processes.
Elio: What are some use specific cases Api.ai can be a great fit for?
Ilya: It fits a landscape of horizontal use cases. We are seeing our technology applied in innovative, creative ways for travel, customer service, e-commerce, the Internet of Things, gaming, automotive, finance, and more. Building more engaging and personal user experiences improves customer retention, increases revenue, reduces operation costs, and promotes productivity. Conversational user experiences let us feel more connected to products, companies, and devices in a more human way while allowing us to automate for efficiency.
Elio: What do developers need to know to be able to use Api.ai? Any prerequisites?
Ilya: Api.ai makes it easy for developers (and non-coders) to design and integrate intelligent and sophisticated conversational user interfaces into their products. Once you create your bot or agent, you can quickly and easily deploy it across various pre-integrated platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Twilio, Cisco Tropo and Spark, Skype, Kik, Telegram and more.
You can leverage several pre-built knowledge packages created for a variety of popular topics based on over two and a half billion user queries processed by the system. When enabled, your agent can understand thousands of diverse requests out of the box – no coding required. Additionally, Api.ai has a robust library of SDKs and integrations with several popular platforms and technologies.
Elio: What’s Api.ai’s origin story?
Ilya: Speaktoit was co-founded by Artem Goncharuk, Pavel Sirotin, and myself; the team specializes in human-computer interaction technology based on natural language conversations and deep neural learning. In 2011 we launched Assistant, an intelligent personal assistant app six months before Siri was released. Assistant is one of the highest rated Android apps with over 30 million subscribers.
Continue reading %Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of Api.ai, on AI and the IoT%
by Elio Qoshi via SitePoint
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