Lucidworks Shares the Power of Search with Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Radu Miclaus, Lucidworks Director of AI, Product, and Cloud, recently joined Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia for an interview with the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Don’t have a spare 40 minutes to listen in? Read a quick summary of the conversation to catch up on AI-powered search, Fusion, Smart Answers, and Lucidworks’ role in powering more valuable digital experiences.

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Smart Answers Brings Deep Learning to Chatbots

The big topic of conversation was Lucidworks’ newest Fusion add-on: Smart Answers. At a high level, Smart Answers brings the power of Fusion to conversational channels by using deep learning to make chatbots and virtual assistants better at resolving natural language questions. “You can type it in or speak it casually, or formally, and the technology underneath the models will be able to find the most similar answer for you and serve it back to you through the same input or output that you choose to use,” Miclaus explains.

Multichannel customer care with Smart Answers.

By empowering users to self-solve, organizations can deflect support cases, saving valuable employee time and support costs while providing a more intuitive experience for the end user. What makes Smart Answers unique is that this QA system is built on top of a search engine. It’s essentially middleware that allows organizations to enhance pre-existing chatbots, virtual assistants, search, or even a custom research application. Whether your user is typing in a search bar or in a pop-up chatbot conversation, the goal is the same: give them the best answer and recommendation in their moment of need.

Use AI-Powered Search to Maximize the Value of Your Knowledgebase

Drilling down further, the Google Cloud Platform Podcast team was interested in use cases in both the digital workplace (which serves employees) and ecommerce (which serves customers). Miclaus explained that one of the biggest challenges in the workplace is an organization’s propensity to add more and more digital data sources without retiring older (potentially inaccurate) knowledgebase documents and files. This is a pain point for employees who are left sifting through an organization’s million-document knowledgebase trying to get the information they need to do their jobs better. It shouldn’t feel like you’re trying to make it to the next level of Jumanji just to get to the information you need!

Lucidworks customer SAS is a great example of the value of AI-powered search in the digital workplace. SAS has over 16,000 employees globally and more than nine million knowledgebase documents and data that grows exponentially every day. After implementing Fusion, the team was able to boost the relevancy of search results and maximize the value of SAS’s data by making it much more accessible. If you’re interested in learning how businesses are investing in these types of digital transformations to support employees and innovation during the pandemic, check out Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes’ talk with Google Cloud here.

Get Better Control of Your Customer’s Browsing Experience

Unlike in the digital workplace, where ROI can be more difficult to quantify, in digital commerce there is a direct correlation between poor search and lower sales—if customers can’t find it, they can’t buy it! Many businesses are struggling to escape the old days of online merchandising and segmentation and instead use machine learning to help support their ecommerce platforms. Miclaus described how Fusion leverages NLP (natural language processing) capabilities, signals (collecting, processing, storage), and content/user analytics, to create that special “you-know-me” experience.

Strong and effective personalization is at the intersection of customer profiles and in-session signals. When you marry these two data sources on-the-fly, shoppers feel like they have a store associate helping them find what they’re looking for. Lucidworks customer Lenovo, the number one PC manufacturer in the world, saw annual revenue contribution through search increase by 95% after deploying Fusion to provide a hyper-personalized experience. Miclaus also shared how features such as Lucidworks Predictive Merchandiser use machine learning and real-time insights to ensure that retailers deliver the right product to the right shopper, at the right moment.

Stay Tuned for More From Lucidworks and Google Cloud Platform

Lucidworks is excited to further our accelerated partnership with the Google Cloud Platform. Check out the podcast recording with Radu Miclaus here if you missed it and keep an eye out for Lucidworks in the GCP marketplace in the near future. If you are curious about how Lucidworks Fusion, Smart Answers or Predictive Merchandiser could improve your digital experience, be sure to drop us a line.