Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the private beta launch of Articulator Lite, their Articulator Pro tool and the increased demand for ‘build it yourself’ applications
Q1: Now, when we last spoke we talked about the launch of Recount, today you’ve announced the private beta launch of Articulator Lite. Can you tell us a bit more about the product and what it means for customers?
A1: Articulator Lite is a tool that allows non-developers to build simple natural language generation applications. So if you’re a business and you want to generate product descriptions straight from your data, you can use Articulator Lite. If you are a finance organization and you want to generate simple stock reports or financial performance reports automatically from your data without having to write them afresh every time or lose yourself in the complexities of Microsoft Word Mail Merge or something like that, you will use Articulator Lite. It’s a very simple tool that sits on top of our relatively complex NLG platform aimed at non-developers.
It’s the first of two tools coming to market. We have Articulator Lite and then Articulator Pro. Articulator Lite will be provided at no charge. Businesses can build up and use it, start developing their own NLG solutions and then pay once they start using it at volume, that’s the idea of Articulator Pro. We’re very excited, it’s been a few years in the works and it’s good to be bringing it out now.
Q2: It’s in beta now, when’s it going to be fully launched?
A2: It’ll be fully launched before the end of the year in December. It’s a tool that our own developers have used to bring some of the solutions to market for our large customers and now it’s a tool we’re using with other developers and non-developers in our private beta. Anyone can join our private beta, just hop on the website, apply to join and you too could be creating your own narratives straight from data. Then we’ll launch it with our underpinning billing engine as a revenue-generating system for us in December.
Q3: Now you also mentioned that there’s an Articulator Pro version, can you tell us a bit more about that?
A3: We’re doing two things. Articulator Lite is aimed at non-developers and has simple use cases so simple data to narrative. Articulator Pro is for developers or larger organizations; those folk who can program using html or java, for example, can use the Articulator Pro tools to build much more complex natural language solutions.
So if you’re a company with a financial services application like QuickBooks or Sage or MYOB and you want to build advisory services, you will use Articulator Pro. If you’re a bank and want to have personalized portfolio reporting instantly – as though your best experts were writing the portfolio reports – you’d use Articulator Pro. If you’re an engineering company and wanted to add narrative and insight to charts and graphs, you’d use Articulator Pro. That’s who it’s aimed at and there will be training for it, there will be technical manuals. It’s a really exciting tool and it really leaps ahead of anything else in the market. It gives a quite phenomenal artificial intelligence power to pretty much any application developer who wants to add narrative to their offering.
Q4: Are you seeing an increased need for ‘build it yourself’ applications in the market?
A4: Yes, Arria can’t keep up with demand. If you recall our business model up until this year was to build it for our clients. We currently have big clients coming to us via our partners like Genpact, IBM and so on. We have big banks, big accounting firms who want us to build AI systems for them; expert systems that write narrative as though in-house experts were writing it, write insights as though insight experts were writing it. That’s how we’ve usually worked via our professional services divisions. We’re building NLG services for big clients, but demand has outstripped our ability to supply to some degree. We always knew that was coming. We always predicted that many hundreds of businesses with many thousands of use cases were going to need the ability to add narrative to their offerings. We’re seeing that now and that’s how we’ve built these tools.
So we’re getting a lot of inbound calls from software providers, from businesses of various kinds wanting the ability to turn their Excel spreadsheets into management reports, insight reports, sales reports and so on. Developer companies wanting to put narrative into every aspect of their user experience and that’s the market demand we’re attempting to match with these tools.
So it’s exciting times. We’re coming out of the lab and into the marketplace with not just our professional services but with our tools offering. That’s a huge leverage point for us because every story that’s written with them, every time they’re used, every time they generate narrative, we click the ticket here at Arria on the way through.
