Excitement about natural language interfaces continues to rise, in part because of the fame and acclaim that the IBM Watson supercomputer has garnered. As impressive as the platform may be, natural language interfaces are also becoming more widely available within a range of applications.
Case in point is DataRPM, a provider of a business intelligence application that sports a natural language interface. According to DataRPM CEO Sundeep Sanghavi, the company’s software can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or embedded within another application. What makes DataRPM different, says Sanghavi, is that its search technology enables users to mash up different sources of data in real time within an ad hoc analysis application.
Sanghavi says DataRPM, which just picked up an additional $800,000 in funding, doesn’t think that organizations should have to invest millions of dollars in new platforms to take advantage of natural language interfaces. The DataRPM approach streams data directly into the application without first requiring it to be stored in a data warehouse.
The concept of natural language interfaces has been around for decades. But with the horsepower available in advanced X86 processors, it’s now feasible to develop applications that natively support natural language interfaces without requiring a supercomputer to run them.
Time will tell if the era of natural language interfaces has finally arrived in the enterprise. If and when it has, all the folks who generate reports on behalf of others just may have to get used to the idea that end users one day soon will merely ask the machine for whatever they want without any handholding from IT required.
