ORLANDO, Fla., March 2, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Kore Inc., a leader in conversational AI solutions for the enterprise sector, today announced its Bots Platform 2.0 release, adding a wealth of new features that enable Global 2000 companies to build chatbots with greater intelligence, sentiment analysis and the ability to perform simple tasks and complex workflows in more communications channels than ever.

Last year revealed mass-market excitement and some unrealistic hype around the power of chatbots and AI. Early developer-led experiments yielded mixed results, but ultimately didn't account for the end-to-end components needed to build successful chatbots that work for diverse user populations, tasks, communication channels and enterprise systems, nor how they'd protect and manage chatbots throughout their lifecycle. Few current market solutions address the security and administrative concerns for today's biggest companies.

"Existing chatbots – and the platform solutions that they are built on – left a lot to be desired in the marketplace in 2016. From our inception we had a different perspective, based on deep enterprise expertise and experience building hundreds of chatbots, on what's truly needed to turn conversational chatbots into a reality for large companies," said Raj Koneru, CEO and founder of Kore. "Our promise has always been to design an end-to-end platform, running in the cloud or on-prem, that creates secure, smart, conversational and quick to market bots for people in the enterprise. The Kore Bots Platform 2.0, which introduces rich new capabilities, builds on that promise and empowers enterprises with a strong foundation for future innovation."

The Kore Bots Platform 2.0 Features

AI to Create More Helpful and Human Conversations
The Bots Platform 2.0 enables the creation of chatbots that have the ability to contextualize, remember, and use data from conversations to execute helpful actions and make relevant suggestions for users on demand, or over time. New intelligence features in the 2.0 release include:

• Context: Allows the bot to maintain session, user and enterprise context throughout all interactions. In other words, the chatbot can keep key information in perspective during a conversation, including what a user aimed to accomplish, data they provide such as addresses, financial info and other preferences, as well as enterprise-level rules.
• Chatbot Memory: Developers can define what information the bot will store in memory, and for how long.
• Learning: The Platform also includes supervised and unsupervised learning models, allowing automatic or developer-driven enhancements to Kore's NL and language models for increased conversation accuracy.
• Sentiment Analysis: Allows the bot to capture average tone score for anger, disgust, fear, sadness, joy, and positivity based on what a user says to the bot. Then using Kore's Dialog Builder they can steer interactions to more helpful places, like a live human agent.

Bots That Can Perform Basic Tasks and Complex Workflows
Since initial launch, the Platform allowed for the design of highly skilled chatbots that could perform a variety tasks, including providing alerts, taking action, and fetching information or reports. The 2.0 release gives developers additional task options including:

• Knowledge Tasks: Chatbots take user questions and query a predefined set of information to rapidly find the right answers.
• Dialog Tasks: Developers can use Kore's robust new Dialog Builder to design advanced workflows for the chatbot to perform using logic-driven business processes and pre-established business workflows. Bots can now understand and consider sub-intents to proactively suggest additional value-added steps and workflows. A new 'pause and resume' feature means users can stop in the middle of a request, make an additional request, and the bot can complete the secondary request before circling back to complete the first.

Omni-Channel Reach That's Scalable and Customizable
The Kore Bots Platform was designed to let people engage with chatbots in the communication channels they use on a daily basis, while also making it sustainable for developers to support an omni-channel strategy. It allows developers to build the underlying tasks of a chatbot once, and simply customize the desired UI elements and responses for specific channels. In the 2.0 release, new communication tools have been added to the channel list, including:

• New Channels: The launch adds Twitter, Cisco Spark and Microsoft Skype to the company's previously supported list.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) That Now Combines the Best of Two Technologies
Most platforms use machine learning (ML) for natural language. The Kore Bots Platform was built from the ground up with an award-winning NLP engine that uses a Fundamental Meaning (FM) approach. The Bots Platform 2.0 release adds ML alongside FM, creating a unique, dual-pronged NL prescription that makes it easier for enterprises to build chatbots that hold accurate conversations out of the gate, regardless of how much training data is available.

• ML Plus FM: Fundamental Meaning and Machine Learning each offer their own unique advantages and limitations, but when used together, developers gain the inherent benefits of both while eliminating shortcomings experienced when used on their own. Kore's FM approach allows for virtually instant NL enablement, and easy bot training. With the ML approach added, developers can also train bots via ML pre-deployment by using a known set of user input data or a training corpus, and over time as the bot accumulates conversation history.

The launch of the company's 2.0 Platform also brings significant advances to its Bot Builder tool and added features for enterprise management, security and control, allowing it to be the leading choice for 75 of the Fortune 500 companies.

"The technology transition from one paradigm to another is generally disruptive, costly, unavoidable, eventually complete and, in retrospect, definitely worth it." -Tom Austin, Mark Hung, Magnus Revang, Conversational AI to Shake Up Your Technical and Business Worlds, September 2016, Gartner

Alongside this groundbreaking release, the company has announced that it will change its name from Kore, Inc. to Kore.ai Inc. For more information on the capabilities that make conversational AI-rich interfaces a reality for large companies, visit https://kore.ai/bots-platform/.

About Kore.ai

Kore.ai specializes in AI-rich conversational solutions designed to bring faster, actionable, more human-like communication back into the daily interactions enterprises have with their customers, workforce, systems, and things.

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SOURCE Kore Inc.