Virtual personal assistant for Android available

Sherpa, Superior Intelligent Personal Assistant, Now Available in New Zealand

• Sherpa is the number one voice-enabled personal assistant for Android in the Spanish-speaking world and is now available in English, with new capabilities
• The technology behind the platform is proactive, transactional, interactive and multilingual. See what Sherpa can do at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoQFstIqGA
• Sherpa is free and available through Google Play

Auckland, 29 April 2013 – Sherpa, the number one virtual personal assistant for the Spanish-speaking world, is now available in beta for the New Zealand market. Android smartphone users can enjoy the platform’s many features – including searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

Sherpa enters the New Zealand market with a broader knowledge base and more proactive and predictive capabilities than current market offerings and includes transactional capabilities that are unique in the virtual personal assistant category. Sherpa also has a lively and fun “personality” that makes it easy for people to integrate the platform into their digital lives – whether they are updating social networks, requesting and playing music, navigating to desired destinations or interacting with a broad set of informational sources. Sherpa’s combined capabilities give users the impression that there is a team of personal assistants, or “Sherpas”, at the ready to help them accomplish tasks and save time.

“Sherpa has been designed to be the interface to our digital lives,” comments Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria, Founder and CEO of Sherpa. “The perfect personal assistant has vast knowledge, can predict your needs and learns about you over time, almost as if by magic. With Sherpa, we are building a platform that delivers unlimited possibilities to make people’s lives easier. Sherpa’s capabilities will only continue to expand; we have developed less than 0.01 per cent of our vision and what our amazing technology is capable of.”

Technology Overview:
Sherpa is the result of 10 years of research and development by Uribe-Etxebarria in advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantics technologies. Sherpa users can interact with the application through instructions given via voice, type or touch for a richer user experience. Sherpa has been designed to be truly multilingual; its unprecedented technology uses an intermediate language of meanings, making it scalable for any language in the world.

Sherpa’s capabilities were recently analysed in a Gartner research note titled “Sherpa: The End of Search as You Know It for CRM,” by Johan Jacobs, Research Director.

Sherpa is able to deliver highly accurate results in response to queries and requests due to its sophisticated Natural Language Processing and advanced semantic technology. Sherpa relies on five levels of linguistic analysis which include morphological, syntactic semantic, pragmatic and functional analysis. Building on Sherpa’s strong linguistic foundation, the platform algorithms further enhance the user experience, interactivity and capabilities.

Today, the beta version of Sherpa incorporates the following technology capabilities to deliver a highly functional personal assistant platform:

• MultiKnowledge System: Draws information from several sources to deliver relevant and targeted content, minimising dependency on search engines. Instead of simply providing search results, Sherpa takes users directly to the information requested, removing a step in the information-gathering process. Sherpa searches across many sources and finds relevant results that are displayed beautifully to the user. The MultiKnowledge system can also retrieve information such as sports results, Yelp-based searches, LinkedIn profiles, translations and dictionary definitions.

• Interactive Information Card: The platform delivers the right information based on Sherpa’s ability to contextualise the topic at hand, delivering a rich, natural user experience. For example if you ask, “Who is Richie McCaw?” Sherpa will know that this is a person and will provide relevant, deep information gathered from LinkedIn profiles, photos, informational pages and websites. If you simply says “Auckland”, Sherpa will present you with information about the city of Auckland, including directions, maps and Wikipedia results.

• Transactional: Sherpa’s sophisticated transactional capabilities enable users to conduct searches and complete related transactions. For example, you can say to Sherpa, “I want a flight from Auckland to Sydney tomorrow.” After getting the results, Sherpa helps navigate you to purchase tickets for the selected option. Users can also complete full PayPal transactions. These functions are completely unique to Sherpa and not available through any other personal assistant application on the market today.

• Proactive: Sherpa learns from user habits and provides timely alerts. Sherpa’s proactive knowledge is not based on what the user tells it to do, it is based on the history of what the user does. Sherpa’s proactive capabilities will continue to expand to anticipate additional user needs with future releases.

• Operations and Device Interaction: Sherpa allows users to perform simple tasks and interact with the mobile device itself. Users can turn the ringer volume up or down, set alarms, make calendar appointments, update their Facebook or Twitter status or retrieve Twitter mentions – all from the Sherpa app by voice command.

Sherpa Summit
Besides being a member of the World Wide Web Consortium and the president of the organising committee for the Bilbao Web Summit, Xabier is also involved in hosting the Sherpa Summit this year in Bilbao on 23 May 2013. The aim of the summit is to bring together business people and experts to discuss the future or technology with a focus on next generation of search engines, mobile search, voice search, interaction and new user interfaces.

Video link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoQFstIqGA

About Sherpa
Sherpa is the most advanced multilingual voice-enabled personal assistant designed for smartphones, cars and digital devices. With headquarters in Bilbao, Spain and Redwood City, California, the application uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantics to create a natural dialogue between humans and digital devices. Sherpa was developed based on research done by Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria, who founded Anboto Group, named Startup of the Year by Guidewire Group’s 2010 Innovate!100, a list of high-potential, fast-moving startups worldwide.

ENDS

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