Ulster University has joined forces with Irish tech firm Maverick Communications International to develop a new B2B lead generation chatbot.
Artificial intelligence tech has been used to automate some surprising tasks that we've always thought of as being uniquely human, from reading medical scans and recognising faces to composing music and answering support questions. AI-based chatbots have been deployed by companies to automate support questions and have even shown promise in helping with medical questions.
Now Ulster University and County Tipperary based tech firm Maverick Communications International are embarking on a new chatbot project with the goal of supporting business-to-business lead generation conversations on the internet. The bot could field questions from visitors to a firm's website with the aim of increasing conversion rates.
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This partnership emerged from InterTradeIreland's Fusion programme, which connects innovative tech firms with universities and other third-level educational institutions across the island of Ireland. The project is being led by recent graduate and Software Developer Shay van Dam at Maverick Communications with the support of academics at Ulster University.
Shay van Dam said: "InterTradeIreland has really helped jumpstart my career by connecting me with Maverick Communications and Ulster University to work on this new and exciting AI project. To be fresh out of university only last year and now be speaking at the Bots & Assistants conference is beyond what I thought I could achieve when I first graduated. I’m very grateful to be working with exciting, state-of-the-art technologies to build a product that will have a positive business impact."
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Professor Maurice Mulvenna, Professor of Computer Science at Ulster University, said: "Ulster University is incredibly active in chatbot research, winning significant funding from European and national sources and from this, we’re delivering our own apps, popular books, journal articles and impact for companies from knowledge transfer activities. It’s vital that we continue to work with Maverick and other great companies as it goes a long way to validate our research as commercially relevant and actually useful in society."
Source: Written based on press release
