<i>&quot;We were trying to do a boldly cutting edge Natural Language Processing startup, but without a top-notch Natural Language Processing expert.&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s worse than that. They&#x27;re trying to do something very hard - a natural language system which can handle a conversation with state, and reliably understands its input.  Very, very few systems do that.  Things like Siri and Google Voice Search will punt to giving you a web page when they don&#x27;t understand enough to give a concise answer. Those systems have huge staffs behind them writing rules for special cases.<p>There are commercial products which might make this do-able by a small team. Teneo has a natural language platform good enough for online banking.[1]  It can do a conversation with state, and can handle business logic for the bank&#x27;s services.  Their dress ordering demo is amusing.[2] Not only does it do the order, it tries to sell accessories relevant to the dress. That could work; presenting the buyer with a few well-chosen options at the moment of sale is good sales technique.  Amazon does that with &quot;Others also bought&quot;, but it&#x27;s not as targeted.<p>But no, they&#x27;re trying to do it with open source software and nobody with a clue.  They also seem to have completely missed that they&#x27;ll need a back end system which looks at the results from the natural language system, notes when things didn&#x27;t go well, and can be used to make the system smarter.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BwOZaPnJIzQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BwOZaPnJIzQ</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artificial-solutions.com&#x2F;natural-language-interaction-solutions&#x2F;natural-language-interface&#x2F;solutions-for-intelligent-websites-applications-and-web-services&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artificial-solutions.com&#x2F;natural-language-interac...</a>