Skip to main content

Humanising Sift : Part 1

I am constantly on the look-out for inventing the most engaging customer interaction methods. On that pursuit, we probably are the first in the world to voice enable the Inbound Offer APIs and thereby delivering a rich and refreshing man-machine engagement. In this theme, we first focussed our attention on Amazon’s Alexa, which is one of the popular voice assistants. The architecture involves the following 3 layers that communicate with each other in that order
  1. Amazon’s Echo, a device that listens to/answers the human
  2. A backend application hosted on Amazon’s infrastructure that manages the conversational flow
  3. Sift Online Server which serves the real time contextual offer upon an inbound request
The Echo device has a very decent voice to text capability. At its base, it offers a good integration with home automation devices and enables voice commands to operate them. As a smart extension, it can connect to Amazon’s backend (skills) on specific voice command requests. This is where the layer 2 comes in. It provides a very constrained but a non-fuzzy natural language capabilities to infer the commands and muster the responses. This layer can also invoke an external webservice within the conversation, which is the layer 3, a Sift Inbound service.

The demo video is posted here and its real fun.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Birthdays and Facebook

I read about a guy who had 400+ friends in Facebook. One day he woke up as a curious little wanker and wondered if he is really that sociable. So he organized a party and sent invitations to all his contacts over Facebook. 50% confirmed and another 20% were tentative. He was delighted - that’s one hell of a response, actually. The real day came. Our man waited at the venue, which happened to be a popular joint, but no single soul turned up. An hour later, one woman came but she also left in the next 30 minutes. He had 400 friends and yet he ended up drinking alone that night. So the question to ponder is how close are our virtual worlds to the reality? . But my case was quite not as somber. Yesterday was my birthday. Facebook reminded of it to a whole lot of my gang. Some of them have never wished me in decades and some are new. How exciting! So here is my big thanks to all my dear friends for the wishes over calls, sms and facebook. You made me feel special. Special thanks to cutie p...
9 comments
Read more

The Zen of Shifting Home

If I have not informed you earlier, I have moved out of Pasir Ris. The primary motive was to get closer to Trisha’s school. The other objectives include sniffing, if not rejoicing, some finer things in life. You know, like most filial Eastern men, I had dedicated half my life for others. So I shall make my ‘fine list’ now before its time to make the ‘bucket list’ soon. This house was love at first sight and my mind refused to even flirt with the other choices. Its bigger, brighter, windier, has sea views AND fits my thin wallet. After all, finesse is directly proportional to how much one can pay through his nose. So we bought this house and the rest of the story is me fulfilling my artistic quest. I drew inspirations from cubism, Zen interior design and minimalism. Cubism is Picasso’s post modern response to breaking traditional patterns in painting. It is simplification of natural forms into cubes, cylinders, spheres, and cones (And there is a lot more to it. Beer session topic!). I h...
6 comments
Read more

Reboot the Universe - Final

It started here Little Trisha has 2 things that I like in her. One - she loves reading. Just that her books have rats as the heroes. Duh!! I have been asking her to grow up. Second - she is random. Radiantly random. This was the recent random thing we did together. That day, she influenced me to a soya milk from the Jolly-Bean’s. Now, soya milk can be boring as sewage. So to give it a bang, they add these ‘chewy pearls’ to it. For the uninitiated, chewy pearls are tiny sweet balls, made using tapioca and dropped lovingly into your drink. If you ever crave to nibble and bite into a soft human body part, you shall try the chewy pearls. So we walked out, bought our cups and started drinking. Baby : Jokes time, Daddy! Daddy : Okay…. Where would a bored cow go? Baby : Where? Daddy : Moooooovie, of course! Ouch!! She giggled at that and got chocked with a chewy pearl. And in a short struggle, she managed to shoot it out of her throat onto the floor. First we thought of cleaning it up. But t...
8 comments
Read more