2011 was a very big year for natural language processing (NLP)—the science of teaching computers to communicate with humans in plain English (or French, or Japanese). First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.
For companies trying to win corporate and consumer adoption of their own NLP technologies, this is a long-awaited moment. And one of the firms that thinks 2012 could be the year this market really takes off is VirtuOz, a Paris-born company that moved its headquarters to Emeryville, CA, in 2009.
Fresh off a $7 million extension of its Series B funding round last June, VirtuOz wants to conquer the worlds of online marketing, sales, and support with its virtual agents—personal question-answering systems designed to help customers get the information they want faster. The company has already picked up a few big clients. If you go to Symantec’s support pages, for example, you’ll meet Nathan, an expert on installing and troubleshooting the company’s antivirus products. AT&T has Charlie, PayPal has Sarah, video game rental site Gamefly has Ryan, and Michelin has—well, the Michelin Man. All are powered by VirtuOz.
CEO Steve Adams says his aim is to double the company’s client base in 2012. That’s a plausible goal, if research firm Gartner is correct in its prediction that 15 percent of the Fortune 1000 will be using virtual agents on their websites within the next three years. “We think we can get the lion’s share of that business,” Adams says.
VirtuOz is the brainchild of Ecole Polytechnique graduate Alexandre Lebrun and co-founders Callixte Cauchois and Laurent Landowski. Back in the mid-2000s, Lebrun believed that the day was fast approaching when computers would be able to understand humans simply from their speech or writing. “Alex would tell you that the ultimate evolution of the technology is going to be the personal virtual assistant who drives both our business lives and our personal lives,” says Adams. But as a near-term commercial application, Lebrun decided to focus on a more limited idea, the virtual agent—a system that sits within a company’s website and represent its brand in real-time communications with consumers.
In its simplest form, a virtual agent isn’t much more than a fancy search engine that can parse natural-language queries and find preformulated answers, the way the original Ask Jeeves did. But Lebrun and his cofounders wanted to go a couple of steps farther. First, they thought a virtual agent should be able to detect and respond to a user’s actual intent. If an auction site visitor types “I want to cancel my bid,” for example, they thought the agent should be able to deduce that they’re talking about a specific bid in an active auction, and show them what to do. That meant designing virtual agent software that could be tied deeply into a company’s knowledge bases and website functions.
Second, Lebrun and his co-founders wanted interactions with their agents to feel like conversations, with a personality at the other end who can recognize tone and mood and ask clarifying questions. That’s why VirtuOz gives most of its agents names and faces. Sometimes they’re photos of models, as with Symantec’s Nathan (see upper right), but usually they’re cartoon renditions. If this brings to mind images of Microsoft’s infamous Bob and Clippy, forget that comparison—VirtuOz’s characters are much less nosey.
For the first four years of its life, VirtuOz focused on the French, German, and U.K. markets. Travel companies and wireless carriers
