Introducing Cape
Today, much of your organisation’s knowledge is communicated or stored in natural language, through documents on your shared drive or instant messaging.
But natural language is hard for computers to understand, so technology hasn’t so far been able give immediate and direct access to this knowledge — even with search it can still take too long, or it can be too difficult, to get the answers you need when you need them.
Bloomsbury AI’s mission is to solve this problem — everybody should be able ask any question they like, to whichever set of knowledge, and get the answer instantaneously.
We’ve started off by building an Artificial Intelligence that reads text documents and answers questions about their contents (called Cape). You can use Cape on your own documents or website, so that users of that knowledge can get immediate answers to their questions. Below is a real example of how well our system performs.
User Question: Would it be appropriate for me to accept court side seating tickets to an NBA event?
AI Answer: “Invitations to expensive of exclusive sporting or cultural events should not be accepted”
In the paragraph:
Any offer of entertainment that might be seen as excessive, as putting the recipient under an obligation, as offered to influence a procurement decision, as in doubtful taste or as liable to bring the Bank’s name into disrepute should be declined.‘Excessive’ would include offers of entertainment that are time-consuming, over-frequent, part of a pattern of invitations to one area from a particular organisation that, taken together, appears inappropriate; or disproportionately lavish. Invitations to expensive or exclusive sporting or cultural events should not be accepted.
Wow! Even though there a very few overlapping words in the question and the answer, our AI still managed to find the right bit of the text.
What happens when the information a user wants isn’t in the paragraph? We monitor the questions people ask, and flag to you when there is some piece of information missing. Then, all you need to do is add an FAQ.
How People Use Cape
Cape For Developers
Developers use Cape to add expressive, powerful question answering to their software within minutes using our API. Updating the documents and adding FAQs is very simple with our easy to use UI, so even non-technical team mates can manage the system.
Cape For Websites
Website owners use Cape to, in the space of minutes, add an AI that answers thousands of user questions about the website in a chat box on the bottom right of the screen (you can see an example on our website).
All they need to do is give the url to our web scraper, add a few FAQs, and then copy and paste a bit of html.
Cape For Teams (Q4 2017)
Teams use Cape to upload their internal process documents (e.g. the ‘Gifts & Expenses Policy’), and team members can then ask questions wherever they are — Slack, other team messaging services, or even an app on their phone.
The authors of a policy receive far fewer repetitive questions by e-mail, and can monitor and improve the quality of their documents by looking at the questions asked.
Our Future Plans For Cape
Our AI can already answer a lot of questions, and it is ready to use right now. We’re impressed by how well it performs on documents like internal gifts and expenses policies, and we hope you are too.
So what next? We’re going to use the data from this version to improve our AI, so that it can answer more questions — even ones that require elements of reasoning and synthesis. Eventually we want to able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human. This will mean that more teams can use cape, putting more knowledge directly into people’s hands.
