An innovative software platform based on Natural Language Processing and Intelligent Dialog Management to build a new generation of interactive services.

Interactive Services (e.g. Conversational Agents) built with IM.MELTEMI2.0 allow you to communicate with your customers virtually, in real time, by chat or voice, text and speech, web and phone, email, SMS, IVR. IM Conversational Agents have the ability to answer questions and effectively provide appropriate answers as if they were actual human agents.

Applications built on top of IM.MELTEMI2.0 include Automated Call Center Agents and Virtual Assistants using fifth generation avatars. They contribute to the building of automated services in Contact Centers as well as sophisticated processing on stored interactions (text and speech) such as call recording analysis and automated email response.

While other technologies use simple key word detection, IM.MELTEMI2.0 actually analyzes the entire phrase in order to promptly and effectively bring about the appropriate outcome. It has the ability to adapt to user requests and make real time adjustments by using built in logic.

The user can speak and write using her/his own pace and control the dialog while the system understands, analyzes and makes the proper decisions. This technology uses a logical analysis strategy to ensure the right interpretation and manages the semantic capacity of natural language. The platform offers real-time interaction and multimodal capability to take advantage of various communication media features (web, mobile phone, fax, email) simultaneously.

Natural Language Interactivity makes feature-rich services easy-to-use and powerful:

• You can build applications that not only understand what the user means, but also manage the conversation, connecting to data and information sources seamlessly.
• NLU is applied to voice and text with the benefit of morphological and lexical analysis, syntactic rules, and semantic knowledge.
• Speech technologies (ASR, TTS) by leading vendors are integrated with standard interfaces, inheriting all the power of up-to -date acoustic models, grammars, language models, semantics, and advanced synthesis.
• All channels are managed with the same priority, and the different results are put together.
• Channels and interaction logic are de-coupled.

• Channel Manager
• Check channel status, readiness, send/receive processes.
• Multimodal Adapter
• Data Preprocessor
• Speech recognition, mood detection.
• Channel Postprocessor
• Specific data formatting according to channel type (text, voice, and web): TTS, VXML, and HTML.
• Data Natural Language Preprocessor
• Understanding, meaning, emotion, classification.
• I/O Spooling
• Management of incoming requests and outgoing answers (queuing).
• Interaction Manager
• Dialog manager, conversation strategy.
• Channel orchestrator (channel timing and sync).
• Multimodal Language Generators
• On the fly creation of the output for each channel (voice, text, avatar + emotion, web page).
• Logic & Ontology
• A mix of reasoning, strategy, knowledge and memory to create Virtual Assistants or Automated Call Center Agents.

Source: Interactive Media

Furthermore, the system manipulates the structure of sentences in a natural language environment to generate, for each channel, coherent actions (voice, text, gesture, face…) during its reply to the user (multimodal language generators).

IM.MELTEMI2.0 allows you to give your IVR and Web a human touch and optimizes the interactive services in order to provide effective communication with your customers.

Natural Language Understanding is a great technology addition to many applications and services: enquiries, orders, account information, help desk, ticket reservations, and many others.

MIND, Media Integrated Natural Dialog, is the design approach used by IM Professional Services team (Natural Language Solutions Group) to deliver outstanding multimedia, multimodal self-services based on Natural Language Processing. Technology itself is not enough to provide the best implementation. This is why, to create efficient call-handling and web interaction, a skillful design process and solid implementation tools are required.

Our comprehensive delivery process ensures that Natural Language Processing is successfully implemented to meet our Clients' business needs. Development and deployment rely on sophisticated software tools, designed by IM R&D teams, to generate an optimized code on a robust communication platform.

IM design includes the following major activities:

• Discovery and Requirements of the Proposed Solution.
• To achieve clear understanding of the required solution, the following information must be gathered and reported:
• Speech application requirements
• Existing system infrastructure (including 3rd party program interfaces and database access)
• Existing network infrastructure
• Reporting and management requirements
• The Proposed Solution is outlined.
• Statement of Work and Timeline
• IM and Client review and agree on the proposed solution.
• The Statement of Work is drafted together with the high-level Timeline for development and delivery.
• A kickoff meeting is held and the change process during implementation is agreed.
• Detailed Analysis and Dialog Definition
• Detailed analysis includes application objectives, service provisioning information, interaction flow, specification requirements, dialog specification, and data exchange protocols.
• Two main documents are generated in this phase:
• Detailed Requirements
• Dialog Specification
• The functional specifications describe the overall service flow and highlights critical dialog states and application behavior. It provides detailed interaction flows for each scenario from initiation to completion of the interactive service (phone or web).
• Description and Application Generation
• Application development is initiated by describing the outlined services; this description will be the input of the automatic code generator.
• Content integration and prompts are included in the Service Description.
• Key activities carried out by IM team:
• Component development
• Grammar development
• Prompts creation
• System integration
• Test
• A test strategy is developed to validate Requirements and Dialog Specification.
• End-to-end application testing is performed.
• In this phase System QA, User acceptance test and test reports are carried out.
• Deployment & Tuning
• Services are deployed and application tuning is started.
• Client is provided with ongoing support information.
• Changes are made to services as required according to collected feedbacks in order to improve QoS.
• During this step the following main activities occur:
• Knowledge transfer to Client's organization
• Operating documents and Management procedures are finalized
• Tuning to identify where the application can be adjusted to improve customer experience, service completion rates and streamline.

IM.SCE, the framework for service creation and management, is a set of web tools that cover the entire life-cycle of an interactive/multimodal application/service, from scope to design, from verification to test. The Service Description is the input tobuild the application through an automated process whereby the information collected during the analysis is transferred tothe service platform. The automatically generated and optimized VXML code will be executed by the Service Delivery Platform. No traditional coding is required; we build the application automatically starting from the service description in a graphical format that Client and IM share and agree on.

IM proven track record of IVR and speech technology experience is the foundation of robust solutions that allow our Clients toget the most from service automation. IM uses certified processes for every step from design todeployment, from tuning tosupport.

This approach is applicable toany Enterprise environment which is willing touse customer interactive services. Solutions are available for onsite deployment and as "software as a service" cloud implementation for industries such as: Financial Services, Healthcare, Government, Retail, Travel & Transportation, Utilities.