Plasticity wants to help chatbots seem less robotic

Y Combinator backed Plasticity is tackling the problem of getting software systems to better understand text, using deep learning models trained to understand what they're reading on Wikipedia articles -- and offering an API for developers to enhance their own interfaces. Specifically they're offering two APIs for developers to build "more robust conversational interfaces", as they put it -- with the aim of becoming a "centralized solution" for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their APIs are due to be switched from private to public beta on Monday. "One thing where we think this is really useful for is conversational interfaces where you want to integrate real world knowledge," says co-founder Alex Sands. "We think it's also really useful when you want to provide instant answers in your application -- whether that's over the entire Internet or over a custom corpus."