July 201819 When Watson played Jeopardy, one of the more powerful demonstrations of Artificial Intelligence was Watson's ability to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to field questions and respond with his answers. Behind the scenes, Watson was converting Alex Trebek's questions from speech to text and from text into search arguments. When Watson then selected the most probable response to the question from the answer set resulting from that search, he was then able to convert that text into speech and use speech to present his responses. All this happened in less than a second, preventing Ken Jennings from being able to press his own response button in time for the majority of questions. The Jeopardy Contest became the launch pad for IBM's Watson business unit and should rank as probably one of the more notable proof of concept projects in IT history. Since the Jeopardy contest, NLP has gained significant traction as a communications pathway in business and in our personal lives. Powered by NLP, Apple's Siri and more recently Amazon's Alexa have emerged as models of a personal digital assistant (PDA). PDAs powered by NLP are now showing up as packaged software applications from the major independent software vendors (ISVs) that the consumer can configure and personalize on both the internet and mobile channels. I watch my wife use NLP daily on her Samsung mobile device to compose her text messages to our children, our extended family, friends, and her business associates. As a home health nurse, she also uses NLP to enter unstructured text comments into her nursing visit reports. Companies in the hospitality industry are using NLP in text bots to greet guests after check-in and offer an alternative channel for order entry of room service and other hotel services like spa and golf course reservations. In several other industries, companies, including LaserShip, where we currently serve as CEO and CIO, respectively, are adopting chat bots as an alternative channel to voice for customer service delivery.What are the common business drivers gradually promoting NLP to be the preferred UX/UI experience for today's consumers and work force, or collectively our target customers? · Emergence of the Mobile Channel­For today's customers, the mobile channel is fast becoming the preferred channel of choice because it offers the time, location, and process convenience of the internet channel but extends this convenience to anywhere and anytime while the end user is on the move. Despite major advances in UX/UI design as demonstrated by companies like Uber and Lyft, however, the form factor of the mobile channel continues to present challenges to any application that requires more complex workflows and significant data entry. NLP can help reduce this complexity in applications requiring either personal or business communications.· Safety­For any company in the transportation industry there is the ever present risk of distracted driver behavior. Traffic fatalities and accidents continue to climb and distracted driver behavior is a major contributing factor in the increase. National and most local government transportation jurisdictions have already passed regulations holding BY EUGENE WILLARD, CIO, LASERSHIP, INC.NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND THE FUTURE OF CUSTOMER SERVICECIO NSIGHTS
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