MEET OUR CODE_N CONTEST FINALISTS 2018: Cognigy from Germany

08/24/2018 | CODE_n18 Startup CONTEST, Digital Transformation, new.New Festival

Searching for a product that offers omni-channel integration? Our CODE_n CONTEST Finalist Cognigy has the solution! With a built-in graphical conversation editor, Cognigy.AI is developed to manage conversations across all engagement channels with real-time integration. Due to advanced natural language and intent mapping, companies can now manage the flow of all conversations from one convenient location using a single conversational Al platform. Curious how that works? In our interview with COO and co-founder Sascha Poggemann we learn more about how Cognigy „gets beyond the words to recognize purpose with state-of-the-art intent mapping”.

Iulia: What is Cognigy all about?

Sascha: Our conversational AI Platform, COGNIGY.AI, provides companies with new and straightforward ways to create and control smart, AI-driven conversations with individual customers in the form of chatbots and voice assistants across any conversational channel such as Facebook Messenger, Alexa, Slack, Skype, Google Home, and many others. The platform provides enterprises with all necessary resources to create and use complex conversational AIs for things like chatbots, voicebots, the IoT, robotics, virtual reality, and augmented reality in a user-friendly way. Empower your tech staff to set up the basic infrastructure of your AI in one central location. Afterwards, the system can be managed by non-technical users. With our platform, companies can create natural dialog between humans and machines and they can even design and scale loyalty programs and interaction with the customers and visitors of digital channels and achieve this more efficiently than ever before.

Iulia: How did you come up with the idea?

Sascha: We originally wanted to create a teddy bear to have conversations with. But pretty soon, we realized that the technology was not available to log context and allow us to have natural two-way conversation with things chopping and changing a lot within the dialog. So we started to write the software ourselves so it could be used to make things like speaking teddy bears. Now our mission is much broader: We want to enable all devices and applications to intelligently communicate with users via natural, spoken, or written language.

Iulia: What are you trying to solve?

Sascha: Modern consumers want brands to deliver uniform experiences across all communication channels. With mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp overtaking social channels in terms of the number of users, plus tens of millions of voice-activated virtual assistants like Alexa hitting the market, not to mention the internet of things now exceeding 8.4 billion connected objects, brands need to be sure they are covering all the right channels. COGNIGY.AI is the ideal conversation engine for feeding current channels and these need to be extended quickly. Enterprises can set up chatbots and other conversational AIs anywhere their business requires. They can enable 24×7 customer support, optimize conversion rates, expand customer service programs to new regions with minimal investment, eliminate service capacity issues, accelerate onboarding, improve internal staff requests, and simply innovate more quickly.

Iulia: There are already a number of companies developing chatbots at the moment. How are you making a difference in the market? And in what way do you contribute to disruption in your field?

Sascha: Our vision is not to create single chatbots. Our conversational AI Platform, COGNIGY.AI, redefines how enterprises design, deploy, and manage AI-driven conversation with each and every customer across different channels, devices, or engagement methods. With COGNIGY.AI, businesses can deploy advanced, omnichannel conversation AI within minutes. It speeds up the programming of conversational AIs by using advanced authoring tools and a graphical flow editor. COGNIGY.AI provides brilliant enterprise features including contact profiles, personalization, conversational forms, endpoints, analytics, and developer features. It meets enterprise requirements in terms of scalability, security, and integration. We empower non-technical users like marketeers or product owners but maintain sufficient levels of flexibility and power for developers and super-users.

Iulia: Thank you for the interview, Sascha!

Meet Cognigy at the new.New Festival 2018this fall, in Stuttgart!