Next IT Launches AI Initiative

NextIT, a provider of conversational artificial intelligence, today announced a new initiative that makes its proprietary AI tools and conversation platform commercially available.

Next IT&'s AI technologies span natural language processing and generation and human-to-human and human-to-machine conversation analysis and leverage a library of 90,000 business intents and 165,00 unique actions gathered across 11 industries. Its runtime conversation platform can integrate with any front- or back-end system and supports secure user interactions on any endpoint.

"It's time for AI to be packaged and delivered in whatever manner a business needs to be successful," said Tracy Malingo, president of Next IT, in a statement. "The walled gardens of proprietary platforms made vendor selection an impossible choice between trade-offs and compromises for customers. Today, Next IT is once again leading the way: in addition to our best-in-class Alme Enterprise solutions, customers can now buy what they need and get what they want."

The AI technologies involved in this initiative include NextIT's Conversation Intelligence and Conversation Experience tools as parts of its Alme conversational AI platform.

Alme Libraries provides a comprehensive picture of how people communicate with automated assistants across domains. It contains more than 20 million real-world labeled user questions, 750,000 unique terms; 1.6 million concept patterns; 90,000 business intents; and 165,000 unique, pre-defined actions gathered across 11 industries.

Included in the offering are the following:

• Cue AI, which analyzes large volumes of unstructured data for immediate insight on the areas where a bot or intelligent virtual assistant should be deployed;
• Prompt AI, which discovers and creates business intent by categorizing large amounts of natural language ideas together to prioritize, test, and deploy language understanding;
• Trace AI, which identifies trends, risk, and improvement opportunities and makes recommendations on those opportunities while continuously learning from user interactions;
• The Context IQ Engine, which leverages numerous NLP techniques and supports full conversational attributes, including multiple languages, two-way and mixed-initiative dialogues, goals, full regression testing, and human influence for scoring;
• The Prompt Predict Engine, which leverages self-learning;
• Author AI, a natural language generation content management system that lets users access and manage digital interactions and responses across endpoints and multiple conditions for business intents;
• Conversation Designer, which enables users to visually design how conversations should look, feel and be experienced; and
• Alme Lab, a visual development environment for modeling the precise language a bot or intelligent assistant needs to understand, including clarifications and multi-step mixed initiative dialogue, as well as the ability to incorporate context and mine data to personalize understanding and experiences.

"Enterprise businesses are looking for intentional ways to deploy AI and are rightly impatient about demonstrating an ROI," said Jen Snell, vice president of marketing and brand strategy at Next IT, in a statement. "Our tools get the enterprise as close to the science of AI as any other component AI player in the market, and our platform is the cognitive glue that seamlessly integrates your systems and helps you deliver conversational AI that consistently performs for your business, regardless of existing investments or engines."

Each of these technologies is available in private beta. The company will release the first conversation analysis tools into general availability during the first quarter of 2018.

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