Two hot of the press stories coming out of Progress. The first release discusses the launch of Progress Labs, the second release introduces their AI driven chatbot Progress NativeChat.
Progress Fuels Innovation with Launch of Progress Labs; Cognitive Chatbot is First Product Release
Progress internal incubator program inspires, enables and supports new ideas; driving innovation in application development technologies
BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and deployment technologies, today publicly announced Progress Labs, the technology incubator in which Progress team members create, test, and bring their innovative ideas to life. As a result of the Progress Labs pilot program run in 2017, Progress Labs has already launched its first product, Progress® NativeChat™, the artificial intelligence-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots.
"Innovation comes in many forms from many places, and we believe that our talented employees possess the ideas that will carry Progress and our customers into the future," said Dmitri Tcherevik, Chief Technology Officer, Progress. "With the establishment of Progress Labs, we're giving our best and brightest a unique opportunity to explore their ideas with the full support of an established technology leader, with the goal of driving new value to our customers over time."
Progress Labs was established to surface innovative ideas within Progress, and to nurture and harness these ideas so they can be developed as a part of the company's product offerings. Each year, Progress Labs commissions a new set of teams that will test innovative ideas through a sequence of experiments carefully designed to prove their economic and customer value. Those selected to participate are freed from their day-to-day responsibilities to focus entirely on their incubator projects which last one to a maximum of two years.
The pilot program for Progress Labs took place in 2017 in which one project was selected and cultivated through the Progress Labs methodologies and practices. This project came to fruition in the form of a new product offering - announced today, Progress NativeChat, the AI-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots. Progress NativeChat enables customer service teams to automate routine interactions, freeing service personnel to deliver better experiences by focusing on higher value-added customer interactions. Unlike other chatbot technologies, the NativeChat solution is based on patent pending CognitiveFlow technology with the ability to self-learn as interactions evolve. Progress NativeChat is offered in 72 languages. For more information about Progress NativeChat, click here.
With ideas exploring augmented, virtual reality, blockchain, edge computing for IoT, new AI-based applications and more, a multitude of new Progress Labs applications are already in hand with the next cohort underway. For more information about Progress Labs and to track the progress of future cohorts, please click here.
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Progress Launches AI-Driven Chatbot, Progress NativeChat
New product offers 15x faster development, native support for 72 languages and ability to integrate with web, mobile and social channels for a seamless digital customer experience
BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and deployment technologies, today announced the availability of Progress® NativeChat™, the artificial intelligence-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots. Unlike other chatbot technologies, NativeChat is based on patent pending CognitiveFlow™ technology that can be trained with goals, examples and data from existing backend systems, similar to the process for training new customer service agents. With NativeChat, organizations can now easily give their customers the ability to converse and transact in a natural way, on the channel of their choice, without the need for human interaction.
Chatbots solve many pressing customer service challenges for organizations - freeing overloaded call center employees to focus on critical business needs by offloading transactional requests, reduction in cost, increased customer satisfaction and more. However, the creation and deployment of chatbots can be complex, with limited results, if not done right. NativeChat removes many of the complexities of chatbot development, speeding time to market, because of its ability to self-learn as interactions evolve.
"Chatbots are most powerful when they are intelligent and context-aware, directly pulling data and insights from systems of record," said Dmitri Tcherevik, Chief Technology Officer, Progress. "NativeChat makes it easy to create chatbots on top of existing systems that interact with users in a natural way and improve contextual understanding, accuracy and forecasting in conversations."
NativeChat can be integrated into self-service web portals and mobile apps, enabling customer self-service across any channel. Customers can also communicate using NativeChat through social channels such as Facebook messenger and other live chat technologies, furthering their ability to engage in the ways that they are most comfortable. NativeChat also integrates with any enterprise system that supports REST APIs.
"We evaluated several chatbot technologies and selected Progress NativeChat because of the CognitiveFlow technology enabling the bot to hold human-like discussions," said Harry Singh, Global Vice President - PowerCurve Software Products at Experian. "We were able to build our proof of concept digital chatbot in just weeks. Given this early success, and our focus on technology that transforms the way we do business, we'll be looking at NativeChat as the potential platform for our new robo-agent service."
Progress NativeChat can:
- Support both transactional and FAQ-style interactions
- Understand natural conversations in 72 human languages, and comes with an optional built-in Natural Language Processing engine powered by Facebook
- Replicate existing web and mobile forms
- Be trained from existing FAQ pages and materials
- Be up and running in as little as two weeks and is as simple to train as a service agent
- Adapt, learn and review chat history without developer support
- Easily integrate with any enterprise systems supporting REST APIs
- Integrate out-of-the-box with the Progress Kinvey serverless cloud application platform
- Integrate out-of-the-box with the Progress Sitefinity web content management platform and the NativeScript native mobile application development technology
NativeChat is the first product to come out of Progress Labs, the innovation incubator inside of Progress. Progress Labs enables the best and most innovative ideas coming from anywhere within the company to be nurtured and funded, driving innovation in the Progress portfolio and delivering new value for Progress customers and partners. Other Progress Labs projects currently being pursued involve augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, edge computing for IoT, new AI-based applications and more.
Progress NativeChat is available today. For details, please go to https://www.progress.com/nativechat.
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Additional Resources
About Progress
Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying mission-critical business applications. Progress empowers enterprises and ISVs to build and deliver cognitive-first applications, that harness big data to derive business insights and competitive advantage. Progress offers leading technologies for easily building powerful user interfaces across any type of device, a reliable, scalable and secure backend platform to deploy modern applications, leading data connectivity to all sources, and award-winning predictive analytics that brings the power of machine learning to any organization. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.
Progress, Sitefinity, Kinvey, NativeScript, and NativeChat are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
Progress
Kim Baker, 1-888-365-2779
pr@progress.com
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