{"id":7803,"date":"2020-11-06T09:43:07","date_gmt":"2020-11-06T09:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/?p=7803"},"modified":"2024-04-24T06:32:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T06:32:25","slug":"conversations-gopher-jughead-archie-and-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/conversations-gopher-jughead-archie-and-bots\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversations – Gopher, Jughead, Archie and BOTs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The predecessor to the World Wide Web was the Gopher protocol and the first search engines I used were Archie, Jughead and Veronica! Information was in files which good-natured people made available, or you got permission and accessed as needed. And even getting nuggets of information using text-based hierarchical systems was exhilarating.\u00a0 Loved it and spent hours with those text-based green screens!<\/p>\n

This was 1991. Exciting times!!<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2020, and today we probably need personal search engines for our disorganised file systems spread across multiple devices, including all the images that we click and store.<\/p>\n

Well, at least, I do! Extend the information deluge to enterprises, and it is no longer amusing.\u00a0 Forget storage, useful & timely retrieval of information becomes critical.\u00a0 And how does one not just institutionalise knowledge but share knowledge?<\/p>\n

Enter AI, ML, DL and NLP, the acronyms which our industry loves so much. The anticipated expectation is that the better these teachers and disciplinarians work together so that they better reflect our brain’s “neural networks”. AI<\/a> is the overarching umbrella with ML being a sub-concept of AI and DL being the sub-concept of ML. And then NLP puts together AI and linguistics to help, us mortals, interact with the binary. And the objective \u2013 How \u201chuman\u201d can we make this conversation as part of engagement between man and machine! With Musk\u2019s Neuralink project \u2013 well, all of this may be defunct!<\/div>\n
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Meanwhile, the use of conversational interfaces is now widening from search to service desks to navigate the forests of knowledge and information through enterprise systems.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, we have navigated systems through hierarchical structures – login, directories, folders and files. We have continued that journey even into our personal lives.\u00a0 But when we retrieve information from our brains, it does not happen the same way!<\/p>\n

Let me illustrate -For example – I remember the year and even the places I listened to, from the songs I heard at that time. It was in January 1990 that I first heard Phil Collins’ Another Day in Paradise\u2019 and it shocked me about the homelessness in the US.\u00a0 \u00a0And I remember the place, the room, the people that I was with at that exact moment in time.\u00a0 When I see smoke, I am unfortunately reminded of the Twin Towers of the WTC. \u00a0\u00a0If I rack my brain to find where my glasses are, I can never remember till I realise that it is literally on my head.<\/p>\n

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When we have conversations with friends and families, we stray tangentially from one topic to the next and come back to the core topic seamlessly. We use all our five senses to understand conversational intent. Our brains think in images, and the hard nut we need to crack is intent \u2013 but<\/em><\/strong> machines have to do this without the five senses that we are all blessed with.<\/div>\n
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How does one get to intent by only using text? Or understand sarcasm? I recall a hackathon we had entered for a German insurance company. The use case was to have analysed documents which were free from complaints. We got through the conversational bit fine, and then the company threw in a Googly (a cricketing term) \u2013 “Can you find sarcasm in the tone of the letters!”. Huh? The irony was bad enough; how can someone grasp German-speaking sarcasm with the language nuances without knowing the language as a native speaker.<\/p>\n

I have used Google translate extensively in my itinerant professional life – including getting a haircut in Turkey.\u00a0 My hair stands up like a porcupine\u2019s quills if cut too short.\u00a0 I tried saying do not cut the hair too short and I received a quizzical look until I used the phrase in google translate and then followed up by showing him a picture of a porcupine.\u00a0 Well, I had the best haircut ever in Istanbul!!<\/p>\n

Context becomes critical and so do boundaries. Teaching the ‘child-BOT ‘is crucial because it cannot be done without boundaries, and it needs to learn by itself as well. The nuances of the spoken \/colloquial language do not help either.<\/p>\n

But I strongly believe that more contextual boundaries of use cases are defined, the better the conversational interfaces and bots will be<\/strong>. Marrying these use cases by harnessing the learnings and broadening the boundaries would dramatically enhance the much-needed institutionalising of knowledge and information. And more critically, the customer experience by enhancing the ability to \u201clearn\u201d intent.<\/p>\n

An Illustration \u2013 Let\u2019s have the overarching boundary and context as the enterprise. The HR framework can be the first use case immediate boundary and context can be just HR-related \u2013 so expenses, leaves, etc.; after the CI \/ BOT has learnt\/evolved, the second use case boundary could be applied to the Finance system. The objective is that the experience of the customer, in this case, the employee, is maximised because the BOT in the process of the HR<\/div>\n
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context has \u201cunderstood\u201d the employee and is able to \u201clearn\u201d about intent. And in most cases, most enterprises have an IT Helpdesk BOT and there is already \u201cknowledge\u201d about the employee. Combining the IT Helpdesk BOT + HR + Finance allows the BOT to leverage ML\/DL. Possibly that helps us to get to understanding the intent better in the context of the corporate world.<\/p>\n

One has nothing but love for those brilliant techies and scientists who brought together AI, Linguistics and Learning! And as we continue our journey into the world of Digital Conversations, the holistic digital experience of harnessing knowledge with intent becomes critical.<\/p>\n

P.S: Love you guys for introducing it all!<\/p>\n

\u2022 The Gopher – thanks to Mark McCahill and his amazing team!
\n\u2022 Archie (Indexing FTP Archives tool and search)- Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, Peter Deutsch
\n\u2022 Jughead (search engine on Gopher Protocol) – Rhett Jones
\n\u2022 Veronica (search engine on Gopher Protocol) – Steven Foster and Fred Barrie<\/p>\n

I can only say as in Bill & Ted\u2019s Excellent Journey, \u201cWe are not worthy\u201d!!\u00a0 Thank you!!<\/p>\n

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\r\n \r\n <\/i>\r\n <\/a>\r\n 0 <\/span>\r\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The predecessor to the World Wide Web was the Gopher protocol and the first search engines I used were Archie, Jughead and Veronica! Information was in files which good-natured people made available, or you got permission and accessed as needed. And even getting nuggets of information using text-based hierarchical systems was exhilarating.\u00a0 Loved it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[501],"tags":[793,1088,1259],"class_list":["post-7803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-bots","tag-gopher","tag-jughead"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7803"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12735,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7803\/revisions\/12735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}