For intelligent search, try Lilo

Imagine yourself at an ATM counter where you wish to withdraw half the money in your account.

So first you check the balance, calculate it's half and then enter the right amount. Imagine if you could simply ask the machine to withdraw half the money in your account.

Picture this. You're an American citizen who wants to visit Kerala and wishes to know how many airlines from the United States travel to Kerala per week.

So naturally you would head for the Internet and run a search, "How many airlines from the US travel to Kerala per week," and expect a decent answer, right? Not always.

What often happens is that the search engine blindly lists all resources with "Kerala" and "airlines" in its database.

To address this problem a Hyderabad-based software, TrulyIntelligent Technologies has developed a search software that can understand the linguistic component of a search query, which makes it more sensitive to what the user wants.

The company is already in talks with corporations across all industries for the deployment of the software. The software has been named Lilo -- after the alien in the movie The Fifth Element.

"Lilo has immense potential. For instance, it can also be used at airports for passenger help. So if the passenger wants to know where a specific counter is, he can just type in the question and get the answer," said Ayyappa Nagubandi, a team leader at TrulyIntelligent Technologies said.

"We are in talks with a bank that is keen on deploying Lilo on its ATMs and for its online banking, and are optimistic about closing this deal soon," he adds.

TrulyIntelligent is also in talks with the Kerala and Andhra Pradesh governments for developing their tourism websites and promotional CDs based on the software.

The company is also likely to close a deal with a telecom service provider for enabling more effective interaction between the users and the company. Which could result in more effective and better customer service.

For example the user sends an SMS wanting to know the list of all the calls made out of his mobile in the last 5 days, the company could promptly send him back an SMS with a list of calls made, a service which is not available anywhere in the world.

Ask him about how much this patented software would cost the end-user and he shrugs, "We will be supplying the software to companies keen on large-scale deployment. Its cost to the end-user depends on what the company will charge."

Incidentally, TrulyIntelligent is also planning to make this software voice-enabled as right now it is just text-to-text.

"We are still working on enabling the voice component and hope to have a breakthrough soon," he said.