Tech Startup Revives Natural Language Search
By Andrea Orr
PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - A new Internet search software company launching on Monday is offering a natural language question-and-answer technology that it says improves on existing products and can help companies automate a lot more of their customer service.
InQuira Inc. says its software enables customers to type plainly worded questions into corporate Web sites, and get back the information they need -- whether it be a list of cars selling under a given price or a more technical question about whether two different software products are compatible.
The San Bruno, California company already has a handful of customers who have adopted the service, including Bank of America Corp.(BAC.N), Sun Microsystems Inc.(SUNW.O) and BEA Systems Inc(BEAS.O).
Software maker BEA said it recently incorporated InQuira's product into its corporate Web site, replacing a question-and-answer service made by Ask Jeeves Inc(ASKJ.O). BEA's Web site is a source of information for large numbers of software developers, and the company says the InQuira software works better than Ask Jeeves in getting their questions answered.
While Ask Jeeves was a pioneer in this natural-language question-and-answer service, some users have and found its product actually works more like a regular search engine. BEA said the Ask Jeeves service also turned out to be very high-maintenance, since it worked partly by constantly analyzing incoming questions and updating the internal "knowledge base."
InQuira's product, by contrast, is built to understand words, similar ideas and phrases, and grammatical constructions, to be better equipped to respond to first-time or unusual questions.
Although some customers report a success rate of 85 percent
with the InQuira software, some analysts say they have still not seen any single leader emerge from a group of companies offering natural-language software products.
"There are a lot of natural-language software companies out there right now and I don't think the market is growing fast enough to support all of them," said Gartner Group analyst Jackie Fenn.
06/10/02 01:59 ET |
