Introduction
When it comes to Web applications, there is nothing as powerful, as
direct, and as easy as expressing yourself in the way you know best - your own language!
Imagine being able to tell your computer, "Update my
portofolio with current stock prices", or "Send a
message to Sid telling him to expect me tomorrow at 3 pm", or "What
flights are available on Thursday morning to Dallas?", or "Set
up a meeting for me next Tuesday between four and six pm". What is the
alternative? Jump to a web page, wait..., fill out a form and submit. Wait
some more. You get the picture. The benefits in ease of use and productivity
are enormous. Now Simplis, Inc. introduces Zlang technology and software tools that allow
Web developers to easily enable their sites to respond to language. You can view
screen shots of proLengua here.
ProLengua
Simplis ProLengua is an easy to use, all-in-one system for
developing and deploying language recognition solutions for the web. The proLengua
integrated environment includes:
A
graphical natural language solution development environment
Integrated
testing and debugging tools
The
Zlang version 1.3 language recognition engine
An integrated Web Services Manager
Standard
XML data files
Support
for regular expressions
A BNF grammar generator
Runs on any operating system that supports Java™
proLengua 2.0 can be downloaded from this site. It is
free and fully functional.
Why Should I Language Enable My Site?
Given two web sites that compare closely in features, users will migrate
to the one that provides the best overall experience. Did they have to "click
and wait" extensively to accomplish a task? If so, language recognition can
give them that "better" experience, and give your site a competitive advantage.
Voice Recognition and Language Understanding
With Zlang, any application can be enhanced with something we call language
understanding. It's easy to confuse that with voice recognition. Voice
recognition turns the sound from your voice into words, or text. It's a difficult thing to
accomplish and several companies are just barely getting good at it (IBM, L&H, and
Dragon, to name a few). Recently, users have been able to dictate into word processing
applications and do some limited menu navigation using only voice. Natural language
understanding, however can now take those words and actually act upon them in an
intelligent way. You don't need voice recognition to use Zlang. You can type in your
requests and still enjoy an increase in productivity and ease-of-use. Natural
language understanding, teamed with increasingly accurate voice recognition hold the
promise of a truly "hands off" conversational interface to software
applications.
Technically Speaking
Zlang is the name of Simplis' basic technology for making language understanding work.
proLengua is a software development tool that makes easy work out of
language-enabling Web applications. proLengua uses Zlang to accomplish this. Both
Zlang and proLengua are written in pure Java. This means that you can use them with
any major operating system, since Java Virtual Machines, or JVMs are freely available for
all major operating systems.
Zlang relies on things called Templates. Templates are designed to
"match" the range of language requests that you want your application to handle.
As you submit language requests to the Zlang engine, you receive a
"result". This result can be anything you like... an HTML page, a script,
etc. You can insert information about the match into this result. |