Everyone else is doing AI. That’s why we just put up a beta of our new Intellyx Brain Chat in order to stay ahead of the curve in the competitive technology analyst market. Yes, you can try out the first iteration of it now at https://intellyx.com/chat.

Here at Intellyx, we cover digital transformation broadly, which means we buck the trend of categorizing all of the vendors into buckets. Over the last 11 years, we’ve written more than 5,000 articles that connect the dots between multiple technology solutions, including many BrainBlogs, whitepapers, briefs, news placements and Cortex columns just like this one.

A few years ago, we launched the Thought Leadership Finder to surface the value of all of our articles in a browseable form. Yes, it’s just an index of our entire content database, with each piece tagged with one or more relevant solutions.

Interestingly, we didn’t need to retire the categories we carried on from the early 2010s like SD-WAN and DPA. Even if they are still useful, they just fade away, as the newer cloud native development and AI-based solutions gradually got more attention. End customers changed their expectations, and solution vendors evolved their positioning with each briefing.

Why we started down this path 

This July, me and my brilliant wife Elena and our two girls were in Europe for a whole month. The first two weeks in Poland, I still worked in Poznan and took calls, visiting her family and then getting out to the mountains in the south near Slovakia, then mostly ejecting from work and visiting all of the Scandinavian countries we had never been to—Denmark, Sweden, and even remote northern Norway, where it was warm enough (51F) to swim in the Arctic Ocean.

One cool aspect of having a full-stack developer as a companion, we had plenty of time for conversations as we were moving around and the kids were on their devices to talk about the future. How will developers and executives, and even analysts stay relevant in today’s AI-driven economy? The capabilities advance so fast, everyone might think information-related work will become obsolete.

On the other hand, AI is generating new forms of technical debt at a rate we can’t even comprehend, and we’ll need people to untangle it for business use. I did a pretty deep dive on observability for AI-generated development in SiliconANGLE a few months back, and talked to the newly-minted “Head of AI” for several strong vendors. Each had great insights, as well as totally unique methods for getting predictable, deterministic results out of a non-deterministic system.

Fortunately, we’re not building an enterprise-grade system, we just wanted to have a version of our analyst content that readers can talk to. And lucky for me, Elena was game to try building one!

Avatar: the first plan

I’ve seen a few convincing conversational AIs with human-like avatars that you can actually talk to on a video chat screen, and they are getting pretty quick, down to sub-second responses in many cases. Some can perceive voice inflection and facial cues to respond to the human user’s approval or disapproval. Many of the avatar models in use today are attractive-looking females for some reason, but you can even customize them to look exactly like yourself.

We started to tinker with demos, but found some different issues with representing ourselves through an avatar. One solution had an up-front setup services project of 2-4 weeks. Another limited the amount of knowledge base size to around 100 pages worth of writing, which would probably work OK for a CSR call script, but not for our massive content. The next one charged per video minute, so it definitely wouldn’t fit into our low-overhead analyst business model to have a ballooning SaaS bill if it caught on.

None of these constraints would stop a regular company from making an investment in virtual agents, if it could deliver ROI versus doing things the old fashioned way. In the end, it’s just a demo app for us anyway, so we decided to stick to a regular text-based chat format and try to use open source or low-cost tools, models and hosting, to avoid opex ...