Volume Releases World's First Commercial Cognitive Web Site Powered by IBM® Watson™

WOKINGHAM, England, Nov. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Does this mark the end of the traditional website, where visitors use cumbersome navigation bars, buttons and drop-down menus or spend arduous minutes finding the right answers to their questions?

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Volume's Digital Concierge™, powered by IBM Watson™ uses Watson's 'conversations' service to allow text-to-speech interaction between a human and a Smart Machine.

The cognitive application called 'LUSY' is trained in a single domain—the company, Volume. The aim is to provide all the information on the company through natural dialogue and Q&A. Volume's Digital Concierge remembers returning visitors and can engage in chit-chat. The application 'learns' through every interaction and question, and only provides an answer when it reaches a level of confidence that this is correct.

Volume's CEO Chris Sykes states, "It's a bold move removing our corporate website for an AI application like our Digital Concierge. However, we needed to do this to amass all the questions it was being asked; whether on- or off-topic. Since its soft launch in October, the application has been asked over 16,000 questions. We learn from those and retrain the application, so it can answer more questions accurately and its domain knowledge grows. That's the beauty of Watson-powered applications."

Volume develops its AI-powered applications iteratively through agile software-development methodologies such as SCRUM. At the base layer it allows a human to have a relatively natural conversation with a machine. The next layer of cognitive services to be added will be able to detect 'the mood of the customer' and their character insights, which will dictate the type of content served up and its tone. The third layer is image- and voice-recognition to provide a more personalized customer experience.

Sykes comments, "We have voice- and image-recognition capabilities right now. The problem we have at the moment is the quality of microphones and cameras in mainstream devices. The majority are not up to the task. For example, most integrated microphones don't have noise canceling, so a spoken conversation can be restricted by ambient noise and busy environments."

Volume sees industry-wide adoption for these applications in the not-too-distant future, from Digital Concierges to Technical Advisors, Digital Sales Agents and Smart Customer Service Reps.

Sykes concludes, "The thing to remember is that these applications have the ability to 'learn'. Ours is growing, but is still relatively young. As it develops, its use will spread; not only will it provide information on our company, but it will also conduct first interviews and induction training. Our AI focus is 'optimizing human performance through Smart Machines', where we move humans from mundane and repeatable tasks to higher-value interactions."

You can interact with Volume's Digital Concierge here: www.volumeglobal.com

Contact: [email protected]

© Volume Ltd 2016

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SOURCE Volume Ltd

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