ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In the pre- and early Google Docs age, tech companies were focused on building platforms and developing AI. Within organizations, companies were building their own internal systems.
Today’s guest, Tim Porter, looks back to that age and recalls: “There was a huge focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning for the end consumer.
“But what people weren't focused on was really leveraging business knowledge that customers need or business knowledge that their employees need,” Tim tells host Hans van Dam, co-founder of Conversation Design Institute.
Back then (and still today) a lot of time was wasted on going through emails or databases looking for relevant documents to answer customer or employee questions.
Tim has solved this problem. He is the Founder and CEO of Kare Knowledgeware, an UK-based software company that makes information understandable and accessible. Kare helps users turn information into knowledge, which can then be turned into conversations.
Kare does this by converting and dynamically maintaining an organization’s legacy knowledge base instantly. It is a proprietary platform, built after years of research using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language understanding.
Kare provides businesses with a simple way to understand what customers need answering. It can bridge platforms and then almost instantly pull answers and convert the information into conversations. The platform can respond to either voice or typed queries.
Using Kare means that businesses can serve up exactly what customers need to resolve issues. Tim and his team took quite some time to arrive at solutions to make Kare work. They had to rethink the whole approach to intent and search. The ultimate solution was looking at use cases and designing the technology around those.
The magic doesn’t end there! The software is self-improving, and will automatically recommend how the system can be better. All of this happens in a controlled environment, where Kare asks the appointed team member for permission before installing its recommendations. All the solutions are completely editable.
In addition, Kare will identify when questions or inputs are starting to cross-reference or diverge, and will recommend that a user actually split an answer so that the information becomes more specific.
Tim says that Kare can work really well for any kind of system in any industry. The system has a web crawler where you literally just put in the website URL and it’ll crawl thousands of pages if you need to, it doesn't matter what the scale is.
If businesses don’t want to launch like this, a user can put Kare in escalation mode, so that information is improved and updated.
For a small to mid-tier business, it can literally be set up out of the box and be up and running within about 20 minutes. For larger businesses, it takes about two to three hours to set up.
Ultimately, it saves money. A business will spend less time searching for information and developing documents containing information, and more time on the real things that matter—including delivering value to customers.
Looking to the future, Tim says Kare is going to enhance the voice tech components of Kare. The enterprise will also aim to become more proactive, meaning that it’s going to build predictability into its searchers. This is possible by following a customer’s journey on a website, tracking what the issues might be, and making changes to Kare over time.
