When I attended Text Analytics World last week, one of my biggest surprises was that Enterprise Content Management can lead to a robot! Stay with me here. Text analytic functionality helps some robotic systems work and think. I was introduced to two rather interesting pieces of technology. The first you already know but with a different use, and the second you probably haven’t heard of before.
Amazon Echo is now being used in healthcare. It’s being used to help answer the question, “Should I take my child to see a doctor?” It asks simple questions with an app called KidsMD to help return results. It’s also being used to help older patients with dementia. As the keynote speaker put it, while a person will get tired of being asked, “What time is it?” Alexa, the Echo’s voice, won’t.
The second one is a humanoid robot named Pepper. Pepper was already being used to staff one of SoftBank’s own mobile device stores. Mizuho Bank uses Pepper as its greeter. Pepper is there to answer the customer’s questions and help guide them to the right person.
The key to both of these solutions is the Text Analytics functionality of Natural Language Search, or Natural Language User Interface (NLUI) as it’s now being called. NLUI looks at a sentence form of a request to generate its search results. Pepper takes this further by using its cameras to identify facial expressions to perform Sentiment Analysis. While text based Sentiment Analysis looks for trigger phrases, Pepper looks at visual clues from the individual asking. I’ll get deeper into this in the future.
So for those of you looking at the bleeding edge of ECM, especially with text analytics, robots may be in your very near future. So remember, before you go kicking around another robotic dog, these guys are learning to read us too.
