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Subjex Corporation (SBJX) |
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CEOCFO Current
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This is a printer friendly page! Subjex Corporation provides artificial
intelligent software that creates virtual customer service representatives whose
intelligence grows through training and usage
Subjex Exchange is an artificial intelligence expert
learning system that yields an optimal and natural customer experience - dialogue. The
entire suite is built upon a software platform that conducts dialogue with users (through
text) to dynamically converse with a normal, human-like conversation interaction. The key
to these products is the iterative "back and forth" methodology. The system is
able to learn users’ needs by asking questions back to them - by "talking".
The Virtual Customer Service Representative SubjexCSR™ is an automated online customer service and support and sales tool with an expert back end real-time Operator Interface training system called SubjexOPS™. SubjexSR™ is an online sales support tool powered by the same natural dialogue engine as the SubjexCSR tailored to a sales scenario and preplanned configuration processes. SubjexME™ is a duplicatable customizable virtual sales agent to meet the needs of a company with many distributors each with their own virtual personality. Search Engine Portal SubjexSEP™ is a custom search tool for your intranet site based on the Subjex Search Engine at Subjex.net. CEOCFOinterviews: Mr.
Hyder, what was the original vision for Subjex and where are you today? Mr. Hyder: “Our vision when we founded the company was to make average peoples lives simpler when dealing with technology. For all the wonderful things technology has done for mankind, it has added layers of complexity in most people’s lives. All people already know how to engage an iterative dialogue; so to bring dialogue to technology is to bring everyone to technology. The only way to bridge the “digital divide” is on a dialogue platform that is affordable and easy to use for every company. When we founded the company it was to build a software platform that companies could develop dialogue personalities on affordably. Dialogue is to Subjex Corporation what Windows is to Microsoft. The Subjex system that can be “bolted” to any type of data or complicated device; you can attach voice recognition (i.e. the “ears”) or speech synthesis (i.e. the tongue) and make is exceptionally easy to use. So after a lot of work we developed a virtual customer service representative with the technology. The technology platform cost us over two million dollars to develop and it has been finished for the last 4 months. Anyone can use it on our website and see that the technology works, and even converse with the software about our company and the product itself.” CEOCFOinterviews: How can it ‘know’ everything it needs to? Mr. Hyder: “People traditionally have a bad impression of artificial intelligence because they have seen characters in movies, robots that speak on television that are able to talk about anything and everything. The reality is that the human brain cannot even do this. Humans need to specialize in one area of expertise because there is not enough time in one persons life-time to know everything, so we specialize and become good in one or two things. In like manner we have created a type of type of artificial intelligence called Natural Frame Dialogue. It is a “frame of mind” or a modular approach to building good dialogue and intelligent in one area. If someone asks our virtual guide (on our website) how many shares are outstanding in our company or when we were founded, it will know that. But if they ask what the weather is like in New York, it will say, “I do not know, I am not connected to a weather data base.” Our clients are only experts in the areas that have relevance to the goals and training of the implementation; therefore, we have developed the most sophisticated yet easy to use back-end AI training system known to exist. Our clients train their implementation as a normal part of doing business.” CEOCFOinterviews: How is the information fed into the program? Mr. Hyder: “The training system that we invented is called SubjexOPS, and it works on any Internet connected PC, and is downloaded. It is a graphic interface that allows you to see all the dialogue that your CSR knows. When we deliver an implementation to a company, we pre-load a level of intelligence, (a frame) on how to engage in small talk. We also preload their FAQ’s and answers into it. SubjexOPS is a very easy to use training system that can do some very sophisticated multi-tiered conversations. See there is no magical formula to deliver AI that is intelligent out of a box; all good AI needs training.” CEOCFOinterviews: Now that it has been developed, what is the next step? Mr. Hyder: “We have developed a pricing strategy that works for all companies and they all get the same technology. This was not easy to do. We are selling this technology for as little as one hundred and fifty dollars a month. There is not much competition within these price points. Our competition charges anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars a year for technology that is similar yet far inferior to ours. To be able to buy and use our technology for a hundred and fifty dollars, I think is a dramatic and bold step. We want to be the facilitator of dialogue, so that everyone will develop on our platform because it is inexpensive, robust and very easy to use.” CEOCFOinterviews: Who is buying the product now, and how do you encourage more sales? Mr. Hyder: “We struggled with how to sell it when we first started but have gained some experience, traction, and credibility, and many people are looking at and talking to our implementation on our web site. What we found in this economic environment is that there are fewer companies willing to spend fifty to a hundred thousand dollars on new technology than there were in the late 90’s, so we developed the strategy to start at the bottom of the market “triangle” where there are a lot of small companies. We designed the pricing so that a company can start with very little money and have their technology selling products and answering questions on their website in a very short period of time. We have developed partnerships with small and very large web-hosting and web-development companies. We have this big push between the combined group to sell this technology and the platform to their clients, which amounts to over 1 million websites. This is an important distinction because it is not just us selling this software by ourselves, our partners are selling the software to their clients, and they already have a strong credibility with their clients. That is our marketing approach right now and it is working very well.” CEOCFOinterviews: Do people have long-term contracts with you? Mr. Hyder: “We have designed our technology around a marketing plan to be platform dependant. This means that we have created the inability to become obsolete with our clients. Everyone builds on the platform because costs are low and it is robust. However as their knowledge base grows they will not stop using it because they have a vested interest in their data. After a few months of training efforts into their CSR, clients are not likely to walk away from it. What is interesting to note is that the more training that goes into it, the smarter it gets, and the better the conversation gets and the more valuable it becomes to your business; we have effectively locked in a customer forever. The beauty of our business model is that we offer a hosted solution providing software that is rented but the data is owned by us unless purchased in a separate agreement. We do not have long-term contracts; somebody can quit any time with two months notice.” CEOCFOinterviews: How does return on investment play into all of this, and is it a big selling factor for you? Mr. Hyder: “I think the return on investment is one of the greatest selling factors. The technology can actually increase sales. When you talk about the web, you are talking about a non-human environment with images, technology, and multi-media, but for the most part, you are not interacting with people when you are at a corporate website. There are solutions that provide chat-type interface out there, but they are one-to-one. What we have created is the ability to leverage the duplication of software, in that our software can have a thousand simultaneous conversations going on about the product or service. The return on investment is incredible.” CEOCFOinterviews: Do you see people skipping the middle step of chat because your system works better? Mr. Hyder: “In the research we have done, we found that people are hesitant to bother a live person, and when they cannot find what they want, they will go somewhere else. Statistics have shown that if 95% of visitors do not get what they want in the first two minutes, they will leave the site. We suggest giving people an environment that is human-like, but one they know is not bothering a human. It is fun, different, and because all conversations are logged it is the only way to know the questions that a customer really wants answered. We see it as the ideal environment to give to give our clients and their customers.” CEOCFOinterviews: What are your biggest challenges going forward? Mr. Hyder: “Our biggest challenge moving forward is managing growth and cash flow. Because we are experts in software automation, we have now automated most of the sales process, all of the setup and billing process, and most of the training of on how to use the system. We are implementing our own technology to train our clients on how to train their implementations. It sounds strange I know, but it is working.” CEOCFOinterviews: Do you have a way of dealing with the differences, which arise from people coming from the different countries? Mr. Hyder: “One of the big things we started seeing when we first went online with the software was people typing things like “how R U?” instead of “how are you?” What we see are phonetic differences not just language differences. What is great about our system is that it learns this slang through the training process, and as it learns, it becomes able to answer 200% more questions than it has specifically been trained to learn. We don’t intend on starting on other languages until sometime in 2004. CEOCFOinterviews: What is the financial condition of the company? Mr. Hyder: “We have been under-funded since the day we started, which has bad and good; it has been good in that we know how to survive and we know how to build good technology under adverse conditions. We have survived the downturn in the market and learned how to market our products successfully. We have a small group of investors that back us and are committed to bringing us to profitability, and we have cut our costs to accommodate that goal. We are spending very little money. The beautiful thing about any software company, and why Microsoft is a giant now, is because whenever you do something more than twice, there is a good chance that you can automate it with more software, and that is what we have done. We have raised and spent over two million dollars on the development of the technology, bringing and keeping the company public, so the hard part is behind us. We have become smart about marketing and are seeing great acceptance of our products.” CEOCFOinterviews: What should potential investors know that they don’t realize when they look at the company? Mr. Hyder: “One of the things investors should know when looking at an ASP company or a company with hosted solutions is that when people subscribe and the sale is made, there is revenue from it continuously. They should see that the stock valuations of those companies have historically done well. We have a software-pricing model that scales well for companies of all sizes and will work for a Fortune 500 company as well as a small company. The end result is that we don’t give it away, and our price goes up according to the number of operators, which bigger companies have. There is a new category that everyone is talking about, e-self-help. People are striving to find ways to cut costs and improve the user experience. We have the killer application for this whole category. Dialogue is the lowest common denominator among all people and what everyone already knows. We have the platform and are bringing it to the masses. We see the future – and it’s all about dialogue™ !” disclaimers |
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