MindMeld Launches the Industry's First Platform for Deep-Domain Conversational AI

"As one of the world's leading fashion apparel companies, Uniqlo is committed to delivering the industry's gold standard for customer service and support," said Makoto Hoketsu, Group Senior Vice President and CTO at Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. "By leveraging MindMeld's Deep-Domain Conversational AI platform, we can offer our customers an expert, AI-powered assistant with deep knowledge about Uniqlo's product catalog, retail locations and more."

The recent success of products such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, and Microsoft Cortana heralds a future where a multitude of voice and chat assistants will soon be on-command to assist with many daily tasks. Unfortunately, the first generation of these AI assistants has failed to live up to the hype.

Until now, companies looking to build advanced voice or chat assistants have had few options. Open source or academic AI toolkits (such as TensorFlow, CNTK, SyntaxNet, CoreNLP, or NLTK) provide advanced algorithms but little data suitable for production-quality applications. Cloud-based developer tools (such as Facebook's wit.ai, Google's api.ai, Microsoft's LUIS, or Samsung's Viv) provide only limited support for building AI models for custom knowledge domains. As a result, consumers have been disappointed and underwhelmed with the first generation of voice and chat assistants.

With the launch of MindMeld's Deep-Domain Conversational AI platform, companies now have access to state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities to power the most advanced voice and chat assistants possible today. These capabilities include the following:

• broad-vocabulary natural language understanding
• question answering across any dynamic knowledge graph 
• dialogue management and dialogue state tracking
• large-scale training data generation and management
• cloud-based or on-premise production deployment

MindMeld has also released this interactive demo to help companies better understand the capabilities and potential benefits of this groundbreaking yet complex technology.

Deep-Domain Conversational AI promises to power a new generation of AI assistants which can streamline common daily tasks such as placing a take-out order at a local restaurant, booking a flight or hotel reservation, creating a service appointment at an auto repair shop or doctor's office, or finding retail store and product information.

"Over the next five years, Conversational AI will transform will transform how consumers interact with products and services provided to them across industries," said Dave Schubmehl, Research Director at IDC. "The companies that can build the best conversational interfaces will leapfrog ahead of the competition by delivering superior customer service with unprecedented operational efficiency."

Just in the past few months, companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have launched new developer APIs for their most popular messaging applications, virtual assistant platforms and voice-enabled devices. As a result, companies that succeed in building useful voice and chat assistants can now reach billions of new users across all of these conversational platforms.

"MindMeld's Deep-Domain Conversational AI makes it possible for our customers to build a single great conversational interface which can then be launched across dozens of different platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant, Skype, Slack, Google Home and more," said Tim Tuttle, CEO and Founder of MindMeld. "Technology like ours enables many companies to offer a single, great conversational experience across every important customer touchpoint."

The MindMeld Deep-Domain Conversational AI platform is available starting today. More information is available at mindmeld.com or [email protected].

About MindMeld

MindMeld has pioneered the AI technology behind the emerging generation of intelligent voice and chat assistants. MindMeld currently powers advanced conversational experiences used by some of the world's largest media companies, government agencies, automotive manufacturers, and global retailers. MindMeld's customers and investors include Google, Samsung, Intel, Telefonica, Liberty Global, IDG, USAA, Uniqlo, Spotify, In-Q-Tel and others.  MindMeld has been widely recognized as a leader in Conversational AI and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the "100 Brilliant Companies" of 2015 and by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's "50 Smartest Companies" of 2014.

Media Contacts
Cristina Dunning, Spark for MindMeld
Office: 415-799-4402
Mobile: 503-507-4758
Email: [email protected]

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