TwinACT Interactive Characters for Online Communications and Customer Service

The core intelligence of the Intelligent Dialog Platform™ is provided by the natural language Answer Engine that can analyze questions and provide real-time answers drawing upon knowledge contained in relational databases and other knowledge sources. The Answer Engine identifies the nature of the question or request, retrieves the necessary information and formulates an appropriate response.

The objective of the Answer Engine is to provide accurate and specific answers to user requests. This differs from natural language systems that serve as front ends to online seach engines. Such systems merely strip keywords from the natural language queries and return matching documents rather than providing specific answers.

This table summarizes the major differences between TwinACT's Answer Engine and search engine technologies:

	Answer Engine	Search Engine
Input	Natural language questions	Keywords (and boolean operators)
Knowledge base	Structured database of answers and information	Unstructured document collection
Result	Direct text answers (spoken by a character)	List of pointers to relevant documents or pages
Task metaphor	Conversation with an expert	Library research

Answers vs. Search