Titulo Estágio
LEXIA: Commands Engine
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas Inteligentes
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
Coimbra
Enquadramento
Today’s generations have new habits when regards to interaction with people and organisations, than previous generations. Smartphones have become the preferred way of communication and even consuming contents, making several companies going mobile-first. If we analyse the most applications used daily by smartphone users, the top apps are text messaging (like messenger), post apps (like Facebook and Twitter), search (google and maps) and email. This usage habits shows a clear preference of interacting using short natural language messages (or search queries/questions).
Companies and organisations have to adapt to this new reality, and provide their customers/users a new way of interaction. For instance, if you think in the banking sector, the way that you interact with your bank is still primitive in digital terms. You have to go to the physical agency (which have the tendency to disappear) and you use the home banking or the mobile app. The problem, is that these web sites or apps are still in the select an action from a menu and use a dialog box to fill the fields, which is not the preferred way of new generations interacting with their Bank. So there is room for having a new way of interaction between customer and organisation: a conversational approach.
But conversational systems exist since the early days of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the new innovation is that the virtual assistants or bots are getting a lot smarter and more capable of using the existing organisation information systems. Critical Software is developing a virtual business assistant to provide these types of solutions to their customers, a system called LEXIA. This system will be able to do four main functionalities: search for information, let the user explore information, perform commands and to be proactive and smart enough to provide the user with alerts and insights.
The goal of this internship is to explore and develop a commands engine for LEXIA, integrating it in the platform being developed. The main tasks of this internship are:
- Explore existing conversational commands engines.
- Specify and Design the engine (which might be based in an already available platform).
- Implement a first prototype and integrate it in the LEXIA platform.
- Test and perform experiments with it.
Objetivo
The main goal of this internship is to develop a conversational commands engine capable of interpreting the user’s commands and execute them. The engine has to deal with the English language and has to deal with business information like a personal assistant would do, having access to the user information (previous interactions for instance), other business related information (like account information in the Banking example) and access to the API of a third party system, where the commands are executed. This goal can be subdivided in:
- Defining the Scope and Engine Main Characteristics
- Creating the Technical Specification and Studying the LEXIA Platform
- Development of the Solution
- Testing and Benchmarking the Solution
This internship will be integrated in a bigger project going on Critical Software (the LEXIA project).
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
The internship has the following stages:
- Defining the Scope and Engine Main Characteristics [result: requirement list, M1 and M2]
- Reading and Writing the State of the Art [result: state of the art, M1 to M4]
- Study of the LEXIA platform [result: platform description, M1 to M4]
- Creating the Technical Specification [result: technical specification, M5 and M6]
- Writing the internship proposal [result: internship proposal, M5 and M6]
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
The second semester comprises the following stages:
- Setting up the Development Environment [result: Development Environment, M6]
- Development [result: first prototype, M7 to M9]
- Testing and Benchmarking [result: second prototype, M10]
- Writing the internship report [result: internship report, M10 and M11]
Condições
É fornecido computador e posto de trabalho.
Orientador
Paulo Gomes
paulo.gomes@criticalsoftware.com 📩