`'Ollie' App Answers Questions About Olive Oil - Olive Oil Times

'Ollie' App Answers Questions About Olive Oil

By Olive Oil Times Staff
Nov. 27, 2017 10:38 UTC

There’s a new way to get answers to ques­tions about olive oil.

Ollie’ is an app devel­oped by the Olive Oil Times Education Lab to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about olive oil wher­ever it is needed.

We see this as an impor­tant ini­tia­tive in our mis­sion to fos­ter olive oil edu­ca­tion.- Curtis Cord

Armed with thou­sands of facts and pow­ered by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), Ollie’s sophis­ti­cated nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing abil­ity invites users to ask ques­tions on olive oil-related top­ics. At the same time, it con­stantly learns to pro­vide bet­ter answers.

The bot is cur­rently deployed on the Olive Oil Times web­site, Facebook Messenger, Telegram Messenger, Microsoft’s vir­tual assis­tant Cortana, via text mes­sage and at oliveoil.bot with addi­tional chan­nels in devel­op­ment.

Olive Oil Times pub­lisher Curtis Cord said Ollie can pro­vide quick, sim­ple answers to over 95 per­cent of the ques­tions peo­ple ask about olive oil, but he sees the project going much fur­ther than that. Our goal is to dis­till all avail­able infor­ma­tion on olive oil and deliver it quickly and accu­rately wher­ever and when­ever peo­ple need it.”

People are ask­ing their refrig­er­a­tors for advice. We’re seek­ing infor­ma­tion from devices in new ways. We want to make sure we’re there with solid facts about this impor­tant food,” said Cord.

Cord said he views the project as one part tech­nol­ogy and two parts edi­to­r­ial. He has set up a small team to sift through, curate and deliver the moun­tains of infor­ma­tion on olive oil pro­duc­tion, usage, qual­ity and health ben­e­fits in con­sum­able bites.

Ollie is just start­ing, but in ini­tial test­ing, more than 97 per­cent of queries were answered through its ever-grow­ing data­base and AI capa­bil­i­ties.

Cord added that he expects the app to assist not only con­sumers but grow­ers, pro­duc­ers and sup­ply chain pro­fes­sion­als as well with instant infor­ma­tion to help them make informed deci­sions.

We’re just at the begin­ning of a long road, but we see the Ollie project as an impor­tant ini­tia­tive in our mis­sion to fos­ter olive oil edu­ca­tion.”


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