Thats-so-Raja !

There was a time in my life when I believed that slogans and mission statements were pure fluffware. I used to think that these were just lame outputs from people who otherwise could not produce anything concrete and worthwhile.  But age and experience have taught me that great accomplishments only come out of megalomaniacal ambitions in the human mind.  The slogans and mission statements are nothing but the verbal manifestations of such megalomaniacal ambitions.  If you are not able to capture your abstract ambition in a simple but a poetic slogan, perhaps you are not even clear about what you set out to achieve in the first place. How dangerous is that!  Besides, a perfect slogan unites everyone to perform harmoniously and with never dying enthusiasm. Now, why am I meandering so much into this? Here we are… its time for the 2018 kick off. We need to inject new enthusiasm and a fresh new perspective to product development. Sift is going great guns wherever w...

Continuing on the theme of humanising Sift, I have taken Google Assitant in this round. ( Humanising Sift : Part 1 is the link to the previous article). Google Assistant is a great fit because of the general purpose nature of the client. While having a nice voice conversation with google on any subject, the user can seamlessly get into interacting with Sift. Check out the video demo here: The architecture again is similar to Amazon’s except for the Assistant app on your phone and the “Actions on Google” platform in the middle. Magically, Sift comes alive for your voice commands. Google’s support for native languages in this part of the world (Thai, Bahasa) would make it even more user friendly. Will post a customer adoption video story soon. Exciting days ahead !

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 Amazon’s Echo, a device that listens to/answers the human A backend application hosted on Amazon’s infrastructure that manages the conversational flow 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 wher...