Changing the game: Intuitive search with machine learning.

Panic! An unexpected meeting popped up on your calendar and you need to put together a presentation quickly for a client. All you need is some material from the previous presentations, but WHERE IS IT? 

The process of finding and retrieving information is often not a finite task, and when we get stuck at the first step of the process, it often leads to mounting frustration. In these cases, you may ask yourself “Why hasn’t this been solved yet?”, as you find yourself desperately digging through Google Drive, Sharepoint, or various Slack channels without success.

To be direct, many search engines actually suck. They merely scratch the surface by looking at keywords that match the documents and data titles. Which, to be fair, can be useful when you know exactly what you're looking for, where it’s located, and the title. But if the query is more complex than that you may be out of luck until you figure it out. Sometimes, typing in a search query and hoping it’s the right one is like throwing a dart into a dark room and hoping to somehow hit the target.

This especially applies to many of the built-in search engines in apps and other digital services - they don’t understand what you’re referring to when typing in a query, their focus is solely on locating matching words. Simple, but flawed. This technology is adequate when the need corresponds to the search engine’s capability, working fine perhaps on an individual level for personal use. However, when you consider the information of an entire company combined with the number of employees involved, the stakes get higher and the complexity richer.

Recognising this led us to create the cutting-edge, reliable and intuitive knowledge management platform that we call NVOY.

NVOY stands as a versatile tool, readily adaptable to your preferences. Connect company apps and services, or any cloud storage solutions, to explore all your company knowledge. 

Imagine asking an employee in a store where you can find a certain food item. They can show you the right aisle, and introduce a few different brands. If you’re unsure, you can describe the item you’re looking for in more detail and the employee will do their best to help. This is roughly how machine learning presents itself to the user when using NVOY.  

NVOY employs both natural language processing (NLP) as well as image processing to ensure results align with your needs. Let’s take a closer look at how it operates.

Finding audio and video

NVOY allows you to find what was said in a video. How? NVOY is able to transcribe your video and audio, while also supporting multiple languages. Once the audio is transcribed, the resulting text is analysed so you can find it in a much more efficient manner. No more scrubbing through that timeline or audio file, just use text, and find the content that matters the most to you!  

Crisp text analysis

NVOY is able to analyse and understand all text that runs through the platform. To do this, we not only extract keywords but also categorise the text into a series of different categories. Additionally, we also give you the ability to design those categories yourself! Another great perk is that NVOY also identifies and analyses text in images, which is perfect for scanned documents!

Tailored Labels    

With NVOY, every document you submit runs through our keyword extraction algorithm. Given a document, we are able to come up with some general categories (e.g., health, technology, and so on). But we also recognise that not all organisations are the same. To solve this, we’ve also designed a custom categorisation engine. This allows you to define specific categories that you would like to detect in your documents. If a document matches that category, we’ll find it, and label it accordingly. For example, a marketing agency might be interested in identifying which content goes with different campaigns to be able to reuse their resources. 

Image recognition

Find objects, colours, seasons (and more!), that appear in the image to narrow down your findings. NVOY detects these by using image processing, meaning the image’s content is analysed and made searchable. To put it simply, say you need to find a few images from a marketing campaign for a summery beverage a few years back. You’re pretty sure they might be buried in a Powerpoint somewhere. Instead of rummaging through the depths of the company’s Sharepoint folders you could search for the client’s name combined with the words “summer” and “beverage” and NVOY will find any images that visually match your keywords.

Automatic Summaries

Using NLP will filter out many irrelevant results, but sometimes we must dive deeper. This is why NVOY also creates automatic summaries of all content, whether it’s a pdf, image, video, or Excel document, you name it! This is great for those situations when you need an overview of larger projects and don’t want to waste time browsing through near-identical documents.

That’s it folks! What do you think about using machine learning and its potential to revolutionise the way we find information? Curious about NVOY and what we can do for your company? Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.