Veveo Releases Conversational Interface for Pay TV Services

Veveo, a provider of semantic technologies for intelligent search, discovery and personalization solutions, has integrated voice and natural language capabilities for television and video search, discovery and navigation with its SmartRelevance Conversational Platform.

The new conversational interface capabilities are available for trial by pay TV and video services operators, connected device manufacturers, and set top box vendors.  Veveo's conversational interfaces will be commercially available as part of its Reveal 3.0 product launch targeted for early 2013.

"Our conversational interfaces are a logical evolution of our deep semantic technologies currently being used by tier-1 operators for natural, intuitive, and intelligent search, personalization, and discovery features for multi-screen television and video services," said Murali Aravamudan, founder and CEO of Veveo, in a statement. "Veveo's new advanced features will enable users to interact with devices and services to get to desired programs through a natural and intuitive process rather than complicated guides and menus."

Veveo already serves more than 45 million televisions in the U.S. and Canada with its Reveal 2 and Reveal 2.1 solutions for advanced predictive search and personalization by operators. Veveo pay TV customers include Comcast, Cablevision, Rogers, and DirecTV, along with Verizon FiOS as a licensee of Veveo's patents. Current Reveal customers will be able to upgrade to Reveal 3.0.

Reveal solutions are based on Veveo's SmartRelevance Conversational Platformthat supports more than 100 million devices globally for television, video, and mobile services.

Veveo's conversational interfaces are designed to do the following:

• Allow users to perform search and discovery universally across available services without the need for hierarchical navigation or structured menus;
• Address navigational challenges for users through natural language understanding with Veveo's core semantic technologies to make usability natural and intuitive; and
• Build on a proprietary Knowledge Graph and implicit personalization capabilities of its proprietary Personal Graph solutions to create hyper-personalized and efficient user experiences.

The Veveo hybrid-cloud platform can be deployed in operators' or service providers' networks, private clouds, or hosted by Veveo. The conversational interfaces maintain state awareness of a conversation to allow users to disambiguate, clarify, and get to desired results through a natural dialogue. Veveo's core predictive search and personalization capabilities aid in making the conversational interfaces intelligent at the outset and adaptive to users' preferences over time.