Miscellaneous
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      What is AI?

      This introductory article explains artificial intelligence and its functionality within the Betty Blocks platform.

      After reading this article you’ll know:

      • What artificial intelligence is

      • What semantic search, NLP, and other important terms stand for

      • How Betty Block works with AI and what kind of use cases we offer

      If you are more or less interested in modern technologies or just read the news, you’ve likely come across such a term as artificial intelligence. Whether you are aware of it or not - it’s already here, getting implemented into our workflows and daily activities. So what is this masterpiece of human creativity and how can we use it in Betty Blocks applications?

      Human and machine

      Artificial intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary concept defined as a machine’s ability to perform tasks associated with humans. AI applications include web search engines (Google), recommendation systems (YouTube, Netflix), understanding human speech (Siri, Alexa), generative or creative tools (ChatGPT and AI art), etc.

      What interests us here is artificial intelligence being able to tackle real-world problems, and assist humans in various situations: from responding to chat messages to driving a vehicle. Naturally, AI gives a lot of possibilities to business applications, helping automate certain processes, providing knowledge support, and dealing with sales forecasting... you name it!

      As a company embracing innovations, Betty Blocks works closely on implementing AI into the user workflow. But before we dive into this topic, let’s first scan through some of the key terms needed for understanding what AI is and how it works.

      What is AI about?

      Semantic search is a data-searching technique that enables one to search for information wisely using algorithms that understand the context and meaning behind the queries. What’s cool about semantic search systems is that they go way beyond traditional keyword-matching searches and deliver more accurate and relevant results. For example, if one searches for all mentions of ‘CEO’ in the text, the semantic search will recognize that there are other ways of saying it: ‘chief executive’, ‘boss’, etc.

      Natural language processing (NLP) is another AI concept - a branch that enables computers to absorb and share information in a human-like manner, both in textual and verbal forms. NLP unites three learning models: statistical, machine learning, and deep learning. Together they serve as a perfect companion for a user by comprehending, interpreting, and generating human language. For example, the latest improvements in the Google Translate application were brought by implementing machine learning.

      Natural language processing is also used with voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa which are powered with speech recognition and process patterns of voices and respond with desired actions and comments. Chatbots are used to perform similar activities but in a text form. They learn to recognize human requests and provide better responses.

      Similarly to how the human brain functions, AI is empowered by neural networks - each neuron can perform its own simple calculation giving complex analysis like image recognition or speech processing.

      Betty Blocks AI features

      Okay, now that we’ve figured out what AI is in general terms, let’s have a look at what features can be added to your Betty Blocks applications. These can be applied to various use cases in the legal area, marketing, accounting, etc.

      • Summarization of documents (or pieces of text) - efficiently processing and extracting valuable information from lengthy documents. This feature analyzes the contents of documents in various formats and generates them leaving only essential points. Whether you’re dealing with a long legal contract, research paper, brand guidelines, etc., the Betty Blocks application powered with AI can help you quickly extract core information. Saves a lot of time and effort!

      • Semantic search for document management systems (like iManage or NetDocuments) uses advanced natural language processing techniques to scan through big document repositories to find the exact information you need.

      • Entity anonymization feature is made for those industries where maintaining privacy and protecting sensitive information is critically important. It enables users to obfuscate sensitive information presented in the document. When applied, personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, addresses, and financial details remains confidential.

      • Classification - organizing and categorizing large collections of documents. By employing machine learning algorithms, AI can automatically tag documents with relevant metadata and labels. Makes it easy to retrieve specific information.

      • Eli5 (‘Explain Like I Am 5’) as legal documents and other complex texts are usually not easily understood by individuals outside a specific domain expertise. Therefore, Betty Blocks offers this feature to transform such texts into their more understandable version. You also can do it vice versa: from simplified to complex.

      • Chatbots, which were already mentioned in this article, are interactive components to engage users in a conversation with AI. They can provide access to information, guidance, support, and respond to queries, and assist with multiple tasks.

      • Tabular data analysis allows to process huge amounts of tabular data and will be a great asset in financial contexts. Users can ask questions based on an Excel sheet full of data. The AI system quickly interprets these queries and extracts relevant information from the tables. This feature is coming up in future versions.

      With all the described features, we are basically just scratching the surface of what you can do with AI capabilities. But even with these examples, you can think of different cases in which artificial intelligence can be applied. Automating processes, boosting productivity, streamlining workflows, improving the security of information, translations, and data analysis - this list can (and will) be continued.