noHold Launches Single Point of Search (SPS) for the Enterprise

MILPITAS, CA, May 30, 2019 - noHold is proud to announce Single Point of Search for the Enterprise. This solution provides companies that have multiple repositories of information an easier way to find and efficiently deliver content to their customers.

Most companies have the difficult task of managing endless content from a variety of different repositories including knowledge bases, community forums, the web site, etc. Typically, each one of those repositories has its own Search capability, but none of them can search everything all at once. This paradigm presents problems such as having to duplicate content so it can be accessible in every repository, keeping each repository in sync with each other, and adding the appropriate tagging mechanisms that may be different for each repository.

Single Point of Search for the Enterprise eliminates these issues by putting a Virtual Assistant on top of all the repositories, so content may be found no matter where it resides. For example, if an end user asks, "How many employees does Company X have?" The Virtual Assistants knowledge base might not have that type of information, but the website should. In this case, the search tool would pull the answer directly from the website and still display it within the Virtual Assistants interface.

Here are a few specific features of Single Point of Search:

• Natural Language Processor & Inference Engine
• Ability to ingest existing documents
• Ability to crawl existing repositories
• Supports multiple languages (English, Spanish, Italian, etc.)
• Works over multiple channels making it available wherever your customer may be (Web, voice, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.)

"Federated Search has been around for some years, but SPS adds two important features to it: a) the conversational style typical of Virtual Assistants and b) the ability of funding specific information within an existing document," said Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, Inc.

Using Conversational AI to get the most out of your Enterprise Database

The conference is almost here! Diego Ventura, CEO of noHold, will be presenting on March 11 at 1:15 PM PST. He's talk is titled, "Using Conversational AI to get the most out of your Enterprise Database." Here is a short summary on the topic:

Most enterprises rely on powerful databases to manage customer relationships, inventory, HR information, etc. But gathering information from them is not always easy and often requires the use of predefined reports or the help of IT specialists.  What if you could simply say: "show me customers in California who have spent at least $500K in the last 12 months and that are non-profit".  It is now possible to create simple straightforward conversational interfaces on top of the databases that govern our lives.  The application of this technology is not limited only to the enterprise, but it can be used also by individuals while shopping, or booking the next vacation: "what laptops do you have with an i7 processor, that cost less than $1250 and with a 2.8Ghz clock?"

Diego will also participate in a keynote panel: Building a Digital Assistant or Chatbot on March 12th. For more details please visit, http://www.conversationalinteraction.com/program

Looking forward to seeing some of you there! 

noHold is Sponsoring AVIOS' Conversational Interactions Next Week!

Next week, March 11th and 12th, noHold will be sponsoring AVIOS' 2019 Conversational Interactions conference held in San Jose, CA. Diego Ventura, noHold's Founder and CEO, will be taking part in a discussion panel, as well as a keynote presentation. Here is a short message from Diego. 

If you are interested in attending, there are still a few coupon codes available. Please send an email to diego@nohold.com and we will be happy to share that with you. 

Hope to see you next week! 

noHold Announces SICURA® Voice to Add Speech Recognition Capabilities to its AI Platform

October 31, 2018, MILPITAS, CA – Previously, noHold announced its ability to provide voice for its Virtual Assistants through Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. Now, noHold is excited to be able to provide its customers with voice recognition and speech synthesis straight from its platform, SICURA.

Integrating SICURA with smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home has been a great first step toward providing voice to our Virtual Assistants, but in some cases our customers want complete control of the customer experience, so we created SICURA Voice. This new component includes:

• Speech Recognition
• Speech Synthesis
• Multiple language support

The Speech Recognition is speaker independent, meaning that it can work with multiple users without training. It is also continuous meaning that it understands free speech, not just simple one or two word commands. It currently supports thirteen languages, ten are European and three are double-byte (Chinese, Japanese and Russian).

Our customers can now create their own voice enabled Virtual Assistant without the need of publishing it on a specific platform, or using a specific invocation phrase.

“noHold has been in the conversational interfaces space for almost two decades. Adding voice to our NLP and NLU solutions is a natural progression that helps us augment our customers’ capabilities,” said Diego Ventura, CEO of noHold, Inc.

About noHold, Inc.

noHold is a privately held company established in 1999 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA, USA (Silicon Valley). noHold is the acknowledged leader in Web based Self-service solutions with a mission to deliver real answers to real questions – real fast. Simple to use, easy to implement and as close to human as you can get, noHold turns automated customer support into cognitive customer interactions. noHold customers include Cisco, Dell, McAfee and a host of industry leaders. More information can be found at http://www.nohold.com.

7,500 Educational Institutions use noHold's AI-based Virtual Assistant to Help Students and Teachers

August 28, 2018, MILPITAS, CA – noHold, Inc. has partnered with leaders in the training space to create a Virtual Assistant now used by more than 7,500 educational institutions.

The Virtual Assistant specializes in supporting teachers to create and administer classes, as well as answer student questions like “How do I sign up for the class?”, “Where can I find the syllabus?”, and “What are the pre-requisites for this class?”

The Virtual Assistant is able to answer these types of questions because:

·        It is built to understand plain English through a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine.

·        It is able to conduct a dialog with end users to confirm uncertain intents through an Inference Engine that serves as a Dialog Manager.

·        It is able to tap into its own repository of information that has grown organically based on the audience’s interests.

It took about six calendar weeks to build the Virtual Assistant, four for implementation and two for testing. The team included a Subject Matter Expert, a Knowledge Base Specialist and a part-time Manager for a total of 200 hours.

Three weeks after deployment, the Virtual Assistant is consistently helping thousands of students and teachers a month, and has an answer rate of 87%. Questions that cannot be handled automatically by the Virtual Assistant are promptly escalated to call center agents. The content of the exchange is also passed along, so that agents don’t have to ask the same questions and users don't have to repeat themselves.

The next version of the Virtual Assistant will be trained to answer IT type questions which will help faculty and students with computer, security and networking issues.

“There are several advantages related to deploying a Virtual Assistant. It can help the school reduce support costs, it is available 24/7, it can help new agents at the call center, and it can diligently capture the voice of the customer. More than 7,500 schools can now enjoy these benefits," said Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, Inc.

noHold Becomes Silver Sponsor for AVIOS' Conversation Interactions 2019 Conference

For the past 2 years, noHold has been invited to attend AVIOS' Conversational Interactions conference, here in San Jose, CA. Diego Ventura, noHold's Founder and CEO has presented each time, sharing his knowledge on AI that he has acquired from 20+ years of experience in the space. 

This year we are doing something special. The upcoming Conversational Interactions conference, noHold is excited to announce we have partnered with AVIOS to become a Silver Sponsor for the event! 

On the website you can find various articles regarding what is going on in the industry, included a few news pieces from noHold: http://www.conversationalinteraction.com/news

We are happy to be part of this growing conference located close to our home base in San Jose, CA. If you are interested in more information or would like to register to attend, please go to www.conversationalinteractions.com

Stay tuned for more news as the conference approaches closer in March 2019. 

CEO of noHold Discusses Albert for Presidential Executive Orders

Just a couple weeks ago, noHold announced Albert in the House. This is a little project we took on to demonstrate how easy and versatile Albert can be. We took Presidential Executive Orders from various Presidents, and uploaded them to the SICURA QuickStart platform. In the end, we were able to take these documents straight from the official White House website and produce an Albert that knows all about these Executive Orders. 

From this announcement, Albert in the House made headlines in some a couple different publications including Forbes and The Next Web. 

"Albert can answer questions like 'What is the purpose of this order' or 'Does this order supersede any other order' and is completely bi-partisan. It doesn't care about your political leanings. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and an Inference Engine (IE), Albert is able to identify the answer to your question on your own terms, eliminating the hassle of manually sifting through the entire document. This method allows people to feel confident they are getting objective facts straight from official documents." Curtis Silver, Forbes

For more information, Diego Ventura, CEO and Founder of noHold, recorded a quick vlog explaining what it is, how to make one, and why it is important for citizens to be empowered with unbiased information. 

noHold Adds Two Bots to Cisco’s Spark Depot

May 30, 2017, MILPITAS, CA – noHold, the recognized leader in web based self-services, is proud to announce that Cisco’s Spark Depot now includes two bots noHold has created using its own SICURA™ AI platform. The Spark Depot is a place for users to browse through and add “integrations and bots that can accelerate business outcomes” to their own implementation of Spark. The bots provided by noHold include:

• SparkHelp Bot- SparkHelp empowers users to find answers about Cisco Spark anytime, directly from the Cisco Spark space.
• WebEx Bot- WebEx bot can answer common “how to” questions about WebEx. To start a chat with the WebEx bot is just like starting a chat with a live person directly from within a Spark room.

To position these bots on the Spark Depot, noHold’s engineering team built a connector that allows users to leverage noHold’s existing chatbots directly within the Cisco Spark platform, adding an extra level of convenience for Spark users. The project took only a couple of weeks, and now this effort can be leveraged by any company that has built a Virtual Assistant using noHold’s AI platform, SICURA. In this sense, SICURA is one of the fastest ways to build a bot for Spark.

The Cisco Spark connector is an important component in achieving the multi-channel strategy pursued by noHold. Diego Ventura, CEO of noHold adds, “We want to make sure that the customers who have invested in our solution, can leverage it on different channels. If you build a Virtual Assistant with SICURA you can launch it on the Web, on Alexa, on Facebook M, and today, also on Cisco Spark.”

About noHold, Inc.

noHold is a privately held company established in 1999 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA, USA (Silicon Valley). noHold is the acknowledged leader in Web based Self-service solutions with a mission to deliver real answers to real questions – real fast. Simple to use, easy to implement and as close to human as you can get, noHold turns automated customer support into cognitive customer interactions. noHold customers include Cisco, Dell, Intel and a host of industry leaders. More information can be found at http://www.nohold.com or subscribe to noHold’s vlog to hear more from CEO, Diego Ventura.

Press Contact

Veronica Cech

Marketing Associate

vcech@nohold.com   

408.946.9200 ext. 356

All other product and service names are the property of their respective owners.

The Search Paradigm is Shifting, Are You Ready?

For the past two decades, the Search paradigm has dominated the person-computer interaction. Companies such as Google have led the way with their minimalistic UI we all know, but we have noticed that this traditional Search paradigm leaves the responsibility of sorting through a long list of possible answers in the hands of end users, often resulting in a cumbersome experience.

This year, the person-computer interaction will shift from the traditional Search paradigm to a next-generation Search experience. There are 4 key ingredients to improving the end user Search experience: N.I.C.K.

1. Natural Language Processor (NLP)

2. Interactive

3. Context sensitive  

4. Knowledgeable

We call this new paradigm the Concierge. Check out this week’s video to learn more about N.I.C.K. 

To find out if N.I.C.K. (the concierge approach) works for your company, contact us to organize an A/B testing between your existing search paradigm and N.I.C.K. 

Best wishes in the coming year, 

Diego