Next IT program earns its stripes
The U.S. Army is using software developed in Spokane to automate question-and-answer sessions on the popular GoArmy.com Web site.
Officially deployed last week, the “Sgt. Star” interactive guide was developed by Spokane-based Next IT Corp. The product uses word-recognition software that identifies concepts, then produces text or recorded vocal answers to questions about Army life or career options.
The new product uses a male voice — recorded by Spokane broadcaster Greg Heister — that answers a wide assortment of questions typed in by a user.
The responses now are in English. Future versions could include other languages other than English, said Fred Brown, president and CEO of Next IT.
The Army already uses a group of trained staff that answer questions on GoArmy.com, said Paula Spilmanthe project manager working on Sgt. Star from the Army’s Fort Knox technology center.
Sgt. Star provides a 24/7 option and allows the military to use those human staff recruiters to answer more complex questions. The general and common recruitment questions can be managed through the automated virtual guide, Spilman said.
“We’re doing a soft launch now, so that we can see how it’s doing,” she said. “It’s gotten much better since we began improving it last fall.” She said the program can handle 60 percent more questions than it did six months ago.
She said the program answered about 4,400 questions in the first two days.
What the program runs into problems, they’re due to unusual spellings and nontraditional online variants of language, said Spilman. For example, when younger users rely on the characters “b/c” to mean “because,” it confuses Sgt. Star, said Spilman. When the software hits an impasse, it tells the questioner to click a link that connects to a live chat representative at GoArmy.com.
The typical session so far involves general questions on how long a commitment the Army requires, where the training will occur and how much the Army pays for enlisting. Sgt. Star then lists a link to relevant pages at GoArmy.com, allowing the visitor to get more detailed information on a range of topics.
The next upgrade should include a spell-check option that will give the product more reliable answers to misspelled questions, Spilman added. Over time the Army will use more aggressive marketing to drive more traffic toward Sgt. Star, she said.
The Army awarded the contract to Next IT last year. Brown has not revealed the amount of the contract or how long it runs.
Next IT project manager Tim Davey said more than 30 Next IT workers have been focused for several months on completing this release version of Sgt. Star. The natural-language software it employs also has been used in earlier Next IT products for Gonzaga University, a Southern California travel firm and by a local Spokane retailer.
“To be honest, though Sgt. Star is the largest version we’ve done, this has also gone much smoother than the others,” Davey said. “We learned and refined our processes so that the implementation has been much smoother.”
Davey said the company has made the product “radically” better in the past year and will make similar improvements over time. “This is just a starting point,” he said.