Acobot Invents an Artificial Intelligence That Learns from the Web by Itself and Builds Conversational AI Chatbots Autonomously

Acobot LLC, an artificial intelligence startup, announced a new release of its artificial intelligence Aco, featuring the capability of self-learning from free-form text such as web pages and creating conversational AI chatbots, which are ready to work as virtual agents for customer support automation, without any further training by a human.

Conversational AI and chatbots are often mentioned as today and tomorrow in the tech circles. For businesses, the efficiency and cost savings derived from the chatbot’s interacting with customers is attractive. As a result, more and more businesses include a chatbot with their website in the recent years. However, lacking in natural language processing (NLP) support, most of those chatbots only accept clicks or match answers by keyword, resulting in poor performance.

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As for the chatbots powered by AI/NLP, their performance is decided by not only the algorithm but also the volume of knowledge they possess, i.e. the data or contents on the subject they work with. Like all other AI applications, the more data a chatbot has, the better it may perform.

Today coding and scripting is no longer a necessity for creating a chatbot because of the emerging of a number of conversational AI aPaaS like BrainShop, another product of Acobot LLC. However, it still requires considerable efforts and resources to manually prepare business-specific data, the knowledge that AI can understand. The turnaround for preparing such data ranges from one month to half a year. The costs often go beyond the budget of small businesses and many projects fail because insufficient data lead to poor performance – the chatbots can answer only 20% or less of questions – and consequently poor user experience.

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Acobot has stepped to address the above issues by using AI to collect knowledge from Web and generate data for chatbots. The artificial intelligence, named “Aco” by the company brand, firstly crawls the text contents from a given website and discovers the business knowledge. On this basis, it builds an AI “brain” for the chatbot, which is then ready to work as a virtual agent on the website. Currently, Aco can finish a chatbot for a website of 1,000 pages in 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the website speed and the page sizes. For smaller websites that contain no more than 100 web pages, Aco delivers a chatbot in just a few seconds.

“The significance of autonomous learning goes beyond chatbots, ” said Vic Duan, founder of Acobot. “As AI can now learn from free-form text, it doesn’t have to count on a human for training data anymore. Having gained access to the biggest human knowledge repository, the Web, AI is evolving at an accelerated pace. We’re excited about the possibilities it brings!”

As one of many possible jobs it may take over, Aco now starts working as a chatbot builder. The website owners only need to provide a domain name and then Aco will take care of everything rest. The human labor is eliminated totally. The turnaround is shortened to a few minutes or even seconds. The upfront cost is reduced to a minimum, to near zero. Different from enterprises like Apple or Microsoft, who make Siri or Cortana as their own chatbots, Acobot is making conversational AI available and affordable to the rest of us.

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