Νowadays, the most frequent channels of communication and customer care of businesses or public organizations are physical stores or offices, which require the presence of the customer / citizen, call centers that require a large amount of human resources from the organization and the official websites of these organizations which are often complex and difficult to use by specific population groups. The Pythia project aims to develop a new generation of electronic communication and transaction channels, which operate in natural language and aim at personalized digital services provision accessible to all, eliminating social exclusion and digital divide. To this end, the project capitalizes on the momentum of chatbots, which are intelligent agents that adapt human conversations and build on the new generation of the internet. The primary objective of the project is to significantly improve the functionality of bots in terms of quality of communication with end users and the level of provided services, developing a specialized understanding infrastructure understanding the Greek language. The development of the infrastructure is based on the use of natural language processing technologies (NLP), combined with the application of machine learning techniques and the incorporation of Discourse Analysis and Reasoning. The integration of these research prototypes, on a single platform, supports the operation of the new business model “Bots-as-a-Service and its commercial exploitation.

Through the collaboration of two research organizations, four companies and a public organization, Pythia’s research results will be adopted and evaluated through applications in four sectors of high importance for the Greek economy (Business Transactions, Banking, Tourism, Public Services). Partner organizations operating in the above sectors will adopt PYTHIA tools to create a new set of innovative interactive multimodal services (transforming existing or designing new ones) for their clients (or citizens). The services will be offered seamlessly through the bot, which will guide the user in all the steps of operation. The resulting services will cover both services provided exclusively by a partner (e.g. information services) and complex services that combine interaction between the two or more or third party systems and (e.g. transactions execution).

Project website: https://thepythiaproject.com/en/about-the-project/