But what are we actually talking about? What is the breakthrough here and what does that mean for you?  

ChatGPT is now the latest tectonic shift in A.I. functionality and truly is that breakthrough. Why?  Because OpenAI has achieved the breakthrough in User Experience.  They didn’t create it, but they did kind of perfect it.  It’s called ad hoc query and the concept has been around since the early 1980s when the relational database boom began (as well as my career, btw). We used to promote ad hoc query at Oracle and it was very real, provided you could speak SQL, or use one of the graphic tools that generated the appropriate SQL. 

Fast forward to the next step in creating the perfect UX. 2011 – Apple launched the iPhone 4s with Siri integrated. For the very first time, millions of us could access the perfect mobile user experience. Hit a button, ask a question, get the answer. Again, ad hoc query, but now Mobile and Voice enabled. 

The very first time I tried this, I recognized THIS was the future. This was the way business applications would be architected, this was the way we would all shop on eCommerce platforms: intelligent, intuitive, interactive. It’s actually what we do here at EasyAsk and Gartner gave us their ‘Cool Vendor’ award for this… but it took another decade for it to be rediscovered and mainstreamed. ChatGPT did that, so ‘thank you’, OpenAI. Combining an Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language query engine with Large Language Models generating comprehensive content for seemingly endless Q&A: Generative A.I.

Like Siri, then OK Google, ChatGPT has the unenviable task of having to ‘index the universe’. So, a common concern is, “is this answer 100% accurate?”. You’ll notice that Chat now qualifies the answer with “to the best of my understanding” or something close. To be clear, this is not a criticism. The tech is fantastic. It’s just always going to be an issue, what content is the answer based upon? They’ve done an amazing job bringing forth a transformative technology and instantly launched the concept of ‘ad hoc query’ forward. We should all be grateful. It IS the perfect User Experience. 

So where do we take this going forward? We, like OpenAI believe in the power of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language mapped to various business applications and vertical market solutions. The future is very bright to transform the User Experience for Business Intelligence and Analytics, CRM, Medical records, eCommerce and so much more. Congratulations and thank you to OpenAI for paving the road here. I believe it will quickly become a freeway! Off we go. 

The post Artificial Intelligence for Business appeared first on EasyAsk.

The first premise in this discussion is the enormous number of shoppers that start on their Smartphones, then abandon the search and finish later on their desktop. This is the ‘norm’ for mobile shoppers. This begs the question, ‘WHY?’ Why did they fail to purchase the first time?

Clearly the experience didn’t work for them. Certainly some of them will buy from the same retailer when they get to their desktop, but how many will ultimately choose a different retailer? And how do you, as an eRetailer, fix this problem and convert those mobile shoppers to buyers?

Simple. Fix the Mobile Shopping Experience. Use the same User Experience all the Smartphone manufacturers have figured out. Mobile Voice Search.

Per Gartner

Conversational commerce — During the past two years, the use of …voice-driven devices has driven interest in their use for digital commerce.

Today… Mobile commerce has low uptake that holds back the potential impact of high conversion on native apps, while responsive design enables the mobile web.

Conversational commerce utilizes natural-language interfaces such as voice and text chat, including messaging platforms, to enable people (and machines) to discover and purchase goods and services via a dialogue.

 Position and Adoption Speed Justification

Conversational commerce is in its earliest stages, but the hype has accelerated considerably in the past year, primarily due to…Facebook Messenger chatbots and Amazon Echo (Alexa). These developments are enabled and driven by smart machine technologies that take advantage of improvements in technology such as natural-language processing (NLP), natural-language question answering (NLQA) and deep neural networks trained on vast amounts of real-world data. This hype is…about a new UI to commerce software, that of voice and text.

Several paradigm shifts in technology and culture are leading to a future, which requires you to be closer to your customer’s context and use of their preferred terminology. By “comes to you” we mean that digital commerce will need to be available when and where your customers are, via the technology they interact with daily including:

• Social messaging platforms
• Smartphones
• Voice-driven smart home devices
• Connected vehicles

… regardless of where the customer is in their journey.

Digital commerce interactions via these interfaces are rapidly moving to include the natural-language interface embedded in these devices: that of text-chat and voice. We’ve reached a tipping point where the utility of the systems have exceeded the friction of using them.

Mobile commerce is the interaction among businesses, people and things via a mobile device that results in a transaction of value for the customer. “Value” could be derived from finding products quickly online or in the store, ordering seamlessly, receiving promotional pricing, redeeming loyalty rewards or coupons, or easily making a payment.

User Advice

Add mobile functionality to engage customers — be it to entice them into stores, make their in-store shopping experience easier, or make shopping on their mobile device easier.

In Digital Commerce, It Certainly Pays to Get Semantic

A commonplace search such as “short, black, sleeveless V-neck dress” . . . that ends in the conversational equivalent of a “404 (document not found)” result. Over-reliance on conventional keyword-based retrieval is simply not enough. This is compounded by the enormity of inventory on digital commerce platforms, and exacerbated by the challenge of linguistic variations — for example, “short black dress with no sleeves and a V-neck” or “black halter neck cocktail dress.”

Ambiguities in semantics arise as well when there are multiple grammatical interpretations possible. “Giant road bike” and “Giant road bike” can mean very different things if the semantics engine cannot infer that “Giant” refers to a brand of bicycle and not the size of the bike in question.

Providing easily integrated Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) with strong semantic understanding and natural-language inference capabilities will become de facto for digital commerce Technology Strategic Partners (TSPs).

The First, the Best, the Best there ever Was

EasyAsk pioneered the concept of Natural Language Search for eCommerce. It’s certainly gratifying to see Gartner and truly the entire Analyst Universe line up and salute the benefits of NLP, but what’s most gratifying is to see the dramatic revenue boost our clients realize within 90 days. The concept of returning highly accurate results the very first time always result in a dramatic jump in sales, but never more than in a Mobile Shopping environment. Imagine shopping exactly the same way you’d speak to Alexa, or Siri or OKGoogle and immediately getting the correct products, with just one touch. THAT’s how you fix the Mobile Shopping problem.

Come join NorthFace, Timberland, True Value Hardware, Lamps Plus and dozens of other eCommerce retailers, and let us show you how to drive significantly more revenue, instantly. We guarantee it.

The post Gartner: The Case for Mobile Voice Search appeared first on EasyAsk.

According to Gartner:

Natural-language query (NLQ) is becoming an important feature across categories to make it easy for users to find content and build queries… [it] will dramatically change human-computer interaction.

Did you catch that? The reason Natural Language technologies matter is because anyone interacting with applications that embrace them will be able to ask questions in normal spoken English (or any other language) and get answers.

Check out this video for a funny, but sobering view of how people use voice to interact with computers:

and this one:

A deep understanding of what the data actually means, provides the Cognitive in Cognitive Computing. Without it, there’s no real understanding.

Next question? What types of applications are we talking about? Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and eCommerce, to name a few.

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Business Intelligence – We are all familiar with BI solutions that generally do the same thing. They push dashboards at you every morning. The data is fresh, sure, but what if you need to ask a question of that data? You go to IT, request a report, and wait a few days (praying that it’s the right report) – just like your parents did when they were using Cognos on the mainframe in 1969. Is there any UX for doing this, seamlessly? Nope.

Customer Relationship Management – Initially designed for Sales Force Automation, The ability to track activities for leads, prospects and customers is the cornerstone of a CRM system. There’s a lot of data that gets entered into CRM but is there an easy way for a road warrior sales rep to ask detailed, pertinent questions, alá Siri, on their Smartphone and get answers? Nope. Other than reports that management finds interesting, what does the CRM system do to make that field sales rep more efficient and help drive more revenue?

Because of the technologies behind Natural Language and Cognitive Computing, there has been a tectonic shift in the way people communicate with computers. A shift in the way we can ask questions and get answers. That shift enables two things. First, it enables users to ask a computer questions the same way they’d ask an associate, or co-worker. Second, it enables the computer to actually answer the question. That’s the game changer. The difference is a robust Natural Language Linguistic Engine.

Let’s go back to the examples above for a reexamination of our questions. For BI, what if there was an app that looked beyond the dashboards into the data to answer ah-hoc questions? Instead of waiting days for a report to be generated, you could have it on the fly – right at your fingertips. For CRM, what if that road warrior could ask and answer questions about the current status across prospects in a specific region to deduce where his/her time would be best spent?

Gartner and Forrester see the shift happening. In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms; strategic planning assumptions incorporate the use of natural language. It may sound like a pipe dream now, but this is the future.

EasyAsk has been telling our prospects and customers that this is the key differentiator between our competitors and us. We have (and have always had) a Natural Language search engine at our core. While others claim to have one, the reality is that they do not. We have been on the leading edge in the use of natural language for years – everyone else is playing catch-up.

EasyAsk has been a leader in providing natural language processing for B2B and B2C eCommerce for decades. Taking advantage of NLP for search and merchandising enables eCommerce professionals to quickly and easily create a searchable catalog, thus enabling shoppers to find what they want the first time on the first page. This leads to higher conversion, more sales, delighted customers and, of course, higher revenues.

Providing a deep understanding of the data that you’re trying to access provides tremendous benefit. The ability to seamlessly ask questions and get answers is a giant leap forward. Whether it’s driving more revenue through Mobile Voice search, or connecting with Business Intelligence data to provide a Siri-like UX, EasyAsk provides the foundation that Mobile users need. Changing the Game.

The post CEO Blog: Cognitive Computing, Natural Language & AI: Game Changers appeared first on EasyAsk.

However, there is a fundamental technology requirement to truly provide cognitive understanding of data. That requirement is built on a bulletproof AI/Natural Language engine that understands, first, the content of data. Now what does that a mean? It means the engine has indexed every possible term, concept and attribute within an application or database(s). It then understands the synonyms of the terms it has indexed. Furthermore, the engine truly understands the relationship between data. That is; tables, views, common join fields etc. providing a deep understanding of data.

Once you have that, you can then start to address how the engine will understand the context of a question. This is the NLQ piece of the puzzle. Natural Language Query: an excellent acronym for asking a question in English (or other language). So here’s the challenge. Ask a question, then get an answer. Sounds easy, damn hard, but completely transformative. Imagine enabling all of your mobile, professional users to simply speak their question and instantly receive the right answer.

It’s so hard, in fact, that very few business solutions can deliver on this promise today. Gartner has NLQ as the Critical Capability in many of it’s Magic Quadrants: Business Intelligence, Analytics, CRM, Data Sciences, Enterprise Search…however, when you take a look at all the technology providers in those Magic Quadrants, you’ll find only a couple that can even start to touch this.

It is, however, at the core of what EasyAsk is and how our engine was designed. Everything we do, whether it’s ecommerce search and merchandising, or providing the critical foundation for establishing your NLQ capability for Cognitive computing, we’re your partner. Just point us at your data and we do the rest. You’re probably trying to determine how to try and add this critical capability. We can show you how.

The post CEO Blog: Putting the ‘Cognitive’ in Cognitive Computing: NLQ appeared first on EasyAsk.

What’s behind your eCommerce search box? You’re not going to like the answer

As an eRetailer, one of the most critical functions on your website is your search box.  This is where your shoppers go to find things they want to buy.  The truth is that, deep down; you know it just doesn’t work very well.  Most eRetailers think that “search” is just “search” and that all search tools are just about the same.  They expect that their search has some navigation, basic spell correction, and maybe type-ahead.  If that’s all search offers, then what’s the difference, really?

I hear this mantra all the time when I attend the Magento Imagine conference, IBM Amplify and Internet Retailer.  It is the general consensus, all search is basically the same.  There’s a reason for that, all of the largest eCommerce platforms, Magento, hybris, IBM WebSphere Smarter Commerce and NetSuite all base their search on an open source keyword engine called SOLR.  Each one of these companies has an army of software engineers trying to make SOLR smarter, make it return better results, make it . . . actually work!  And, by the way, each of these platform companies knows that their search is, in a word . . .  awful.

Search giants like Google faced the same dilemma for almost a decade.  Google was originally a keyword search engine with hundreds of software engineers working on algorithms for years, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get the engine to become intuitive.  Google foresaw the future of search when Apple launched Siri, and acquired a natural language, contextual based search engine and quietly replaced their existing engine.  As an internet user, I’m sure you’ve noticed how much more intuitive Google has become.  Their search-as-you-type works brilliantly and has been extended to OKGoogle for mobile voice search.  If you haven’t tried mobile voice search, you should.

Wouldn’t it be great if your eCommerce site worked like that?  Go ahead, close your eyes and envision your mobile site with one-button, voice-enabled search.  Your shoppers will become buyers as they press one button, speak their request and have exactly what they are looking for pop up on the screen.  As an eRetailer, if your shoppers find what they want the first time, with the first search on the first screen, don’t you think they will buy that item from you?

Well you can actually have all of that and more in about two weeks time.  Our search engine, EasyAsk, gives your eCommerce site the edge by offering spell correction that is automatic and accurate, and type-ahead that is intuitive and serves up the exact products you are looking for before you finish typing.

When it comes to all other eCommerce keyword search engines, search IS just search.  If you want to improve your results, have higher conversions and delighted buyers, you can bank on a smarter, more intuitive search solution.  Come join The NorthFace, Timberland, True Value and 400 other eRetailers who have already made the switch to EasyAsk.  The last thing you want to do is to bet you business on a free, obsolete, open source search solution.  Sometimes, you get what you pay for and ‘free’ might just be the most expensive decision you could make.

The post You’re Betting Your eCommerce Business on . . . SOLR ??!! appeared first on EasyAsk.

Here’s the how and the why of it.  As CEO of EasyAsk, I’m certainly attentive to my company’s needs.  I have to confess, I’m one of those guys who checks on my business at the traffic light.  Yes, I know.  I’m sorry.  But, as one of those guys, I’ve also seen plenty of others driving down the road, weaving across the lanes, and working their smartphones while driving – an accident waiting to happen.

Siri fixes all of that.  Yes, there have been dictation products on the market for awhile, allowing you to press a button, dictate your text or email, send and done.   But what Siri can do goes beyond what you have seen on a smartphone before – it understands the intent of the question.  Why?  Because there’s a Natural Language engine embedded within Siri.

We all cheered when IBM Watson won on Jeopardy!  And we might see what Watson can do when applied to large problems like healthcare.  But Watson ran on a network of computers that could run the Starship Enterprise.  Siri sits in the very palm of your hand using the multitude of services available on the Internet.  Siri will be in the hands of a hundred million consumers.  Watson will cost a hundred million dollars.  Okay, maybe not that much, but you get my drift.

Back to the paradigm shift concept – With Apple Siri on every iPhone or iPad and eventually on your computers, EVERYONE will reap the benefits of voice recognition on top of natural language.  It will become the standard way we all communicate with our computers, tablets, smartphones, and more – interactively, intelligently, naturally.  Ask your question EXACTLY as you would to a live human being and you’ll get what you asked for.  This is the advantage of natural language.  THIS is the paradigm shift.

But how does this apply to the business world?  That’s where EasyAsk steps in. 

Want your customers to find products faster and easier?  Give them a better shopping experience no matter where they search from – iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, Android, etc.  Allow them to ask for exactly what they want, ‘Ladies blue blouses under $50’.  Magically, blue blouses start appearing. EasyAsk gives your e-commerce site that, and so much more.

Now take it one step farther.  Apply this concept to your business..  You are walking into an investor meeting and want the latest sales figures.  Push a button on your smartphone and ask, ‘What was closed revenue versus forecast last month’? EasyAsk displays both the actual and forecasted sales figures!  You’ve got the answer and your investors know you are on top of things.  Now you’re talkin’! (Pun intended). 

We’ve now taken real business productivity and made it ubiquitous.  You can find the right information faster via the same natural language interface on your smartphone and your computer.  We’re interactive, we’re intelligent and it’s all natural.  Paradigm shift indeed.  Give us a call or send us a note.  We’ll help you get it done, naturally.

The post It’s elementary Watson . . . it’s all about Siri! appeared first on EasyAsk.

The consensus is clear: the Endeca acquisition was driven by the need for Oracle to expand its BI solutions and have more offerings to sell to existing Oracle customers.

But does anyone remember when Endeca was an e-commerce search company? What about that segment of their customer base? What should Endeca e-commerce customers expect?

The acquisition news is fresh, so there is little solid information beyond a few comments expecting an integration of Endeca’s search and merchandizing with Oracle’s ATG platform. Does this imply that ATG will become the primary, or even only e-commerce platform which Endeca supports? Where does this leave customers using Endeca with other e-commerce platforms (WebSphere, Magento, others)? With all the focus on the BI aspect of this announcement, I’m not sure anyone knows the answer. . . yet!

What I can tell you is this – Endeca e-commerce customers should not be surprised if they’re treated as second-class citizens. A recent study by Computer Economics found that “42% of Oracle (ORCL) customers are dissatisfied with the quality of Oracle’s support while 58% are dissatisfied with the cost of the support.” And that was for traditional Oracle customers! What about Endeca customers coming into the fold? What about Endeca SaaS customers? Who knows?

What I can tell you for certain is that EasyAsk believes in customer satisfaction. Or as Ford Motors used to say it is ‘JOB 1’. Since we spun EasyAsk from Progress Software back in ’09, we’ve made sure our ALL our customers know how important they are to us and how committed we are to making them successful.

Providing the very best search and merchandizing technology is what EasyAsk is all about. We can deploy in a fraction of the time it takes for a traditional Endeca site and typically ¼ the costs.

Our natural language based search provides dramatically better results, while our merchandizing tools are so intuitive and easy to use you can return control of your e-commerce merchandizing to the experts – your merchandizers.

This is why NetSuite, Magento and Infor were excited to partner with EasyAsk. We provide IBM Watson-like natural language functionality that is intuitive and optimized for customers and end users. With EasyAsk powering you search, when a visitor searches for a product they get the right result the first time, every time.

Congratulations to Endeca on their sale to Oracle. I’m sure they knocked it out of the park. Congratulations to Endeca’s investors and to their employees.

For Endeca’s e-commerce customers however, this might be a different story. If you are looking for best of breed search technology, remember that EasyAsk is here for you too.

Thanks for listening,
Craig

The post Oracle Buys Endeca – Another E-Commerce Software Company to Vanish? appeared first on EasyAsk.

Think about it for a minute.  Apple competed with EVERYONE !  They competed with all the PC manufacturers back in the ‘80’s.  They competed with the largest software company in the world, Microsoft.  They competed with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell . . EVERY hardware manufacturer, almost every software company. 

APPLE did it their way, Steve’s way.  He had a vision and he never let go of it.  I loved (and bought) everything Apple ever built . . .  well, except for the Newton.  OK, no one’s perfect.  Good idea and they got it right decades later with the IPAD. 

I’ll never forget the 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh, (directed by Ridley Scott) that ran during the Super Bowl.  You could have knocked me over with a feather at the conclusion of that ad.  And it never ran again.  Are you kidding me?!

Who had the moxie, the chutzpah, the pure audacity to take on IBM like that?  One shot, but unforgettable.  Brilliant.

And, years later, after building Apple Computer into a $2 billion company, . . .  they fired him.  Maybe one of the most successful marketing moves since New Coke.  No, really.  New Coke was fabulously successful.  Not for the product, but for stimulating an unprecedented demand for Classic Coke.  The net effect was to propel Coca Cola back into first place vs. Pepsi.  Steve said his firing was one of the best things that could have happened to him.  Off he went to start NeXT Computer, then in his spare time, spun off the Graphics Group from Lucasfilm, creating Pixar.

Pixar !  What Steve had done for the PC world, he now did for the world of animation.  Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and many more.  26 Academy Awards,  7 Golden Globes, 3 Emmys.  He later sold it to Disney for a lousy $7.4 billion, becoming the largest single stockholder at Disney.  Astounding.

NeXT was, of course, acquired by Apple in 1997.  Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?  Steve rejoined the company and served as CEO from 1997 until a few months ago. 

Steve Jobs, thank you for my iPhone, my iPad, my Macintosh(s).  Thanks for iTunes, iBooks.  Thanks for defining ‘intuitive’ and building it into every Apple product.  Thank you for your commencement speech at Stanford, 2005.  If you haven’t had a chance to read the speech here is a link to it.

I sent this to everyone here at EasyAsk and to my 3 young adult children.  I’d strongly recommend you set aside a few minutes of your time.  It will touch your soul.

Most of all, thank you for being one hell of a role model as visionary, leader and CEO. 

And thank YOU for taking the time to read this. 

The world has lost a giant . . .

The post Steve Jobs – We Have Lost a Giant appeared first on EasyAsk.

You might want to take a second look at that.  While it might have looked like the right decision at the time, you’re now drowning in the annual maintenance costs.  And for what?  A search box that really doesn’t work very well.  In fact, it’s hardly functional.  Frustrated visitors who leave your site because they could not find what they wanted?

EasyAsk has a radically new idea!  A search box that actually WORKS!  Plus you will have rich, easy to use analytics and tools that allow your team to tune your search faster and easier than you ever dreamed.  Add to that, we’ve have all the navigation and merchandizing features you’d ever want or need.

Most importantly, your shoppers can find what they want THE VERY FIRST TIME.  If they can find it quickly, they’ll probably buy it.  That’s called customer conversion and no one does it better than us.  Imagine giving your customers the ability to search for ‘ladies blue blouses under $50‘ and immediately delivering the exact product(s).  Try that with Endeca.  Good luck. 

We’ll bring you all the advantages of IBM/Watson to your e-commerce site, but we’ll deliver it NOW and we can get your site up and running in a couple of weeks.  Best of all, we can provide all the benefits that EasyAsk has to offer in an on-premise model or hosted SaaS from one company, with the very best search technology in the industry.

Switch to EasyAsk and you will get superior e-commerce search functionality and your annual Total Cost of Ownership will go down dramatically.  Best of all, you customer conversion rates will go up.  We guarantee it.

Give us a call or feel free to send me an email.  I’m craig@easyask.com.  We’ll dramatically cut your costs and increase your bottom line profits. 

Thanks for listening.  Craig

The post You’re Paying Endeca How Much?! appeared first on EasyAsk.

Elementary, my dear Watson.  A famous Sherlock Holmes line, never written by Arthur Conan Doyle, by the way.  Straight out of the movies.

So, Watson has always been widely recognized.  But now Watson is EVERYWHERE , and with good reason.  We congratulate IBM for their impressive (and expensive) accomplishments in building a Natural Language solution designed to win at Jeopardy.  We understand the enormity of the challenge.  After all, we’ve been building Natural Language solutions for Ecommerce and Business Solutions for a decade. 

What IBM Watson did for Jeopardy, we do for you, our customers.  If you’re an EasyAsk ecommerce customer, we put the search results on the very first page.  Every time.  If you’re using EasyAsk for Business, we provide your end users instant answers to their complex questions like:  ‘who bought products last year, but not last quarter?’ 

 So we can be your own company ‘Watson’, except for one thing.  Watson got a few questions wrong.  When we deploy our solutions on your site:

. . .  we won’t put your business in jeopardy.

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