The SER Group has been exploring the topics of cognitive functions, machine learning and artificial intelligence for some time now. The analysts at Gartner and Forrester consider the enterprise content management (ECM) software Doxis4 to be one of the most innovative products in the market. SER is positioned in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Content Services as a "Visionary".

From idea to implementation

The research groups of AIT and SER dealt with the question of if and how natural language interaction would be possible with an enterprise content management system that manages documents, metadata, records, tasks and processes. Working together over a five-month period, the team developed a prototype that recognizes and processes the intentions of the speaker. The goal was to make it possible for the user to interact with Doxis4 without needing to look at the screen. Some questions the user could pose would be: How high is the net amount of the inbound invoices that are currently being verified? Which new tasks are in my workbasket? Did the project manager already revise the project plan? A second module enables the Doxis4 clients to be controlled via speech commands such as "Show the first document" or "Go forward ten pages".

Utilizing cutting-edge technologies of neural networks, acoustic speech models and artificial intelligence, language recognition has made great advances in the last couple years. AIT tested the implementation of various technologies for language recognition and assessed their suitability. Furthermore, AIT developed a special analytics model that investigated the input in natural language to recognize the user's intended meaning.

SER's development team has taken up the results of the research group, headed by Dr. Sven Schlarb (scientist at AIT) and Markus D. Hartbauer (Solutions Architect of SER), and is now evaluating the integration of natural language search queries into Doxis4 applications.