Autodesk Extends Use of AnswerWorks for Help and Support; WexTech AnswerWorks to Provide Natural-Language Help to New Geographies.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SAN RAFAEL San Rafael (săn rəfĕl`), residential city (1990 pop. 48,404), seat of Marin co., W Calif., a suburb of San Francisco on the northern shore of San Francisco Bay; inc. 1913. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2002 Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq:ADSK ADSK Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ stock symbol) ) and WexTech Systems, Inc., today announced that Autodesk will expand its use of WexTech Systems, Inc.'s AnswerWorks natural language processing Natural language processing Computer analysis and generation of natural language text. The goal is to enable natural languages, such as English, French, or Japanese, to serve either as the medium through which users interact with computer systems such as system to more of its product line. AnswerWorks, a question-answering engine for adding an easy-to-use, natural-language interface to both local help systems and Web-based knowledge repositories, allows Autodesk customers to pose questions that are phrased in everyday language. AnswerWorks technology provides Autodesk users with faster, easier, and more accurate access to customer support information in Autodesk's help and support solutions systems. "We've used AnswerWorks for two years in our AutoCAD products and its ability to help customers find answers and support in multiple languages has compelled us to extend our use of AnswerWorks to other Autodesk products and locales," said Billy Hinners, senior director of AutoCAD Engineering at Autodesk. "In addition to the AnswerWorks' intuitive functionality, WexTech's service and support has been excellent. They've been with us every step of the way to help integrate AnswerWorks into our help and support systems." AnswerWorks complements Autodesk's customer centricity Customer centricity refers to the orientation of a company to the needs and behaviours of its customers, rather than internal drivers (such as the quest for short term profit). by allowing product development teams to create smarter help systems that make it easier for users to find the information they need. AnswerWorks' index-building engine analyzes text and creates a linguistic image describing the content of every sentence, storing words in root form along with information regarding each word's context. AnswerWorks' automatic handling of synonyms, morphology, and disambiguation dis·am·big·u·ate tr.v. dis·am·big·u·at·ed, dis·am·big·u·at·ing, dis·am·big·u·ates To establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for. (the changes in a word's meaning depending on its use in a sentence) are among the most striking differences between AnswerWorks and full-text or keyword searches. Once AnswerWorks has been deployed, its analytics allow ready identification of the issues causing users the most difficulty. And unlike other natural language query A query expressed by typing English, French or any other spoken language in a normal manner. For example, "how many sales reps sold more than a million dollars in any eastern state in January?" In order to allow for spoken queries, both a voice recognition system and natural language systems, AnswerWorks' tools provide a large degree of automation, simplifying update and maintenance. "WexTech has a small but very elite group of clients," says Steve Wexler, WexTech's founder and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. . "We're able to enjoy the luxury of only working with companies that provide the very best electronic performance support systems. Autodesk is doing some truly groundbreaking work in making sure its users have the information they need, when they need it. It's a huge shot in the arm to see our technology used as effectively and successfully as it has been inside of Autodesk products." AnswerWorks currently supports local and server-based Help systems developed and deployed in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, with additional language support under development. About WexTech Systems, Inc. WexTech Systems, Inc. was founded in 1985 and provided microcomputer training and consulting services for Fortune 500 companies. Early adopters of Microsoft Windows See Windows. (operating system) Microsoft Windows - Microsoft's proprietary window system and user interface software released in 1985 to run on top of MS-DOS. Widely criticised for being too slow (hence "Windoze", "Microsloth Windows") on the machines available then. , WexTech's expertise in Microsoft Word A full-featured word processing program for Windows and the Macintosh from Microsoft. Included in the Microsoft application suite, it is a sophisticated program with rudimentary desktop publishing capabilities that has become the most widely used word processing application on the market. and Microsoft Excel (tool) Microsoft Excel - A spreadsheet program from Microsoft, part of their Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh. Excel is probably the most widely used spreadsheet in the world. Latest version: Excel 97, as of 1997-01-14. prompted Microsoft to hire WexTech to write Using WordBasic in 1990, and to develop all the templates for Microsoft Word 2.0 the following year, as well as manage the Word and Excel tracks of the Microsoft tools developers' conference. Also in 1991, WexTech released Doc-To-Help, the world's first commercial Help authoring tool. WexTech's expertise was again called upon by Microsoft in 1998 to write the Official Microsoft HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. Help Authoring Kit. [pilcrow (paragraph sign)] In 1996, WexTech formed a strategic partnership with Knexys Knowledge Exchange Systems, a Belgian linguistic technology R&D company. The fruits of this relationship have manifested in the AnswerWorks(R) brand of products, used by many leaders in self-help and e-support, including Intuit, Autodesk, and Knowledge Impact. AnswerWorks can be seen in action at www.freeanswers.com. For more information on WexTech Systems, Inc. visit www.wextech.com. |
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