For a few years now I've been pushing the idea of using machine learning to rethink how we build websites. Today I've got more good news. In yet another example, we can now get a lot closer to building a google like search experience for all the Sitecore sites we build. The sample project I've put together to demonstrate this is called "Intelligent Search" and is built on top of the Sitecore Cognitive Services "Core" and uses Microsoft's LUIS to parse input questions for a search form to answer common domain specific questions as well as engage in conversations with the user.
For the amount of value that this provides, the work required comparatively is very light. Just starting with answering the top three questions for any given business should immediately mean higher conversion rates on your goals. There's so many occurrences where asking any question to a site search offers you nothing. Not a product link, not any business information. Nada. But today is a new day. We have powerful new tools that can improve the type of experiences we can provide our audiences.
Here's some videos to get you started:
This all hinges on the ability to parse language but what does that even mean. Well when someone says "I'm looking for two tickets to the Jay-Z concert in Chicago" we have a lot of information that we can use. The hardest part was always breaking up those statements in a general way to extract what words matter. This is where LUIS comes in (but you could do something simliar with IBM, Google, Amazon among others). What it does is allows you to provide sample (training) phrases and then mark sections of those phrases as terms (variables). This allows you it to learn what parts of phrases should be extracted and provided to you as a developer. The Intelligent Search module has some sample training data that breaks down the phrases into parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective etc). Some of the sample intents and form conversations that it handles are:
Search Intents
Single Field Forms
The installation goes like this:
Most of the setup is actually within Luis and Azure portal but once you've gone through that process and are familiar using the endpoints becomes almost trivial. The most valuable part of all of this is really the training data. Once you start developing your own applications, the training data is what you'll spend the most time curating for your unique business needs or client needs.