Moni.ai Blog A comment on Moni.ai's natural language understanding

As a new visitor of Moni.ai you might have tried out some of the featured Voice Channels like "What's in the news today?" - or you asked a question and got some answer. But then you might have asked yourself "What is behind this?" and "What is it good for?".The answer is that natural language is the basis for most of our daily human-to-human interactions. Every day you go to work you have specific tasks that you need to work on and problems that you need to solve. However most of these things don't work without talking to your collegues and customers. It starts with a "Hello" but also includes questions about things and places. If you have a job interview you will be asked for your education - and you are expected to speak their language and have some "general intelligence". That is what we want to give Moni.ai as well.With Moni.ai we are building a virtual assistant, an artificially intelligent agent, that allows you to voice control your business and automate processes. Basically a machine that you can talk to to get things done. Now, if you start a new job you will need to learn a lot of specific things. Like "how to use the accounting software" - e.g. what to do if someone asks me to "reimburse my travel expenses"? That is what you need to teach Moni.ai as well: You define a Voice Channel and connect your software and automate this process. What is already there is the "general intelligence". That means you can not only say "Hello" and "How are you?" but also ask general questions like ... "who is coloxhaulquai?" - Moni.ai will even excuse your typo (that would not work with a search engine - try it!) and give you the result "In Aztec mythology, Coyolxauhqui was a daughter of Coatlicue ...". So how does that work?It would not be intelligent if answers were just kept statically in a virtual "brain". What makes Moni.ai intelligent is the fact that Moni.ai is a dynamic system that learns with every interaction. That means in case Moni.ai already heard that (or a similar) question you will receive the most likely answer to it immediately. Otherwise your question will be redirected to a team of human experts doing internet research for you. They will usually return the answer within minutes by email. Moni.ai will also remember that answer.Of course there are cases where you really don't want Moni.ai to talk about the weather or do anything else than what you defined. That is no problem - there is a switch in your user profile to control this. Otherwise Moni.ai will respond to anything whereas your predefined Voice Channels will have higher priority than general chit chat.This is what makes Moni.ai a completely new approach to human-machine-interaction.