Noodle Factory’s AI-powered chat platform halves the time needed to set up a chatbot and improves the accuracy of its answers

Home-grown startup Noodle Factory helps companies to whip up AI bots in an instant. The company’s AI-powered chat platform enables companies to set up their chatbot in minutes by uploading documents such as training slides, white papers, journals, articles and online informational pages. The question-and-answer (Q&A) engine then searches through the contents of the uploaded documents to predict user questions, and the relevant answers to populate the bot knowledge base.

In its earlier iterations, however, the Q&A engine suffered from a low accuracy rate. It was powered by the Bidirectional Attention Flow (BiDAF) natural language processing model with an algorithm that catered only to factoid queries or questions that could be answered by short factual statements. The model also failed to give good results when sentences or paragraphs did not have correct punctuation, or if the information that was provided was incomplete.

To address this, Noodle Factory enlisted AI Singapore’s help under the 100Experiments (100E) programme, to explore how they could improve the accuracy of their Q&A engine.

New AI-based chat model

A new AI-based chat model was developed, and trained on data from different domains so that it could handle a wider variety of questions. When documents are ingested, the platform is able to select relevant sections from a given document to answer users’ questions.

The model helped to boost the accuracy of answers from the baseline model of 66 percent to 73 percent.

A number of commercial and educational institutions have deployed Noodle Factory’s solution, including Singapore Institute of Management, which has built a chatbot to provide student support, and act as a virtual tutor in Economics.

The platform has halved the time they needed to set up an AI-powered chatbot, and provided an efficient solution for connecting users to information that they wanted.

Yvonne Soh, co-founder and chief executive officer of Noodle Factory, said the use of AI has enabled the company to provide a better solution for its customers. “It helps them improve productivity by automating the flow of information to connect users with the information they need, when they need it – without having to introduce new processes or hire additional headcount.”

* AI Singapore caught up with Yvonne recently to talk about Noodle Factory. Listen to the podcast to find out more.