Web Tool Makes for Good Conversation
In October, Vic Nagy, hotline operations manager at Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich., hired a new virtual service representative he dubbed "Ernie." Powered by software from San Francisco-based NativeMinds Inc., Ernie answers questions over the Web about Ford's car problem analyzer, the Worldwide Diagnostic System (WDS), from repair technicians at 5,600 Ford dealerships nationwide.
"It has a uniqueness that we really like, a natural language interface," says Nagy. That means Ernie can answer questions posed in conversational format, such as, "How do I run the WDS on a field test?" Ernie has been programmed to understand what a technician means by "WDS" and "field test." Plus, it tracks the topic of a back-and-forth interaction with a technician, so if Ernie gets a follow-up question like "How do I hook it up?" it knows to what "it" refers.
Nagy says that context-sensitive capability and around-the-clock availability has made the system a valuable supplement to Ford's human-staffed help line, which is open only 12 hours a day, six days a week.
How Ernie Works
NativeMinds' NeuroServer is the brains behind Ernie, says Scott Benson, co-founder and chief technology officer at NativeMinds. Customers interact with NeuroServer via the Web, he says. A Web server processes the questions, passing them to the NeuroServer. When the NeuroServer finds an answer, it returns a Web page to the questioner.
NeuroServer runs only on Windows NT; a Solaris version is scheduled to ship in the second quarter, with Linux following before year's end, says Benson.
Chris Martins, an analyst at high-tech consulting firm Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston, says NeuroServer's most important feature is its ability to step through a sequence of questions, where the follow-up question is based on the previous question.
That conttext sensitivity makes it able to drill down to just the right answer, he says, and is significantly different from the more common search engines that Web
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