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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.

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 while 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 to +1(415)997‑5600 and at oliveoil.bot with addi­tional chan­nels in development.

Olive Oil Times pub­lisher Curtis Cord said Ollie can already 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 of the 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 being one part tech­nol­ogy, two parts edi­to­r­ial and 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 get­ting started but in ini­tial test­ing, more than 97 per­cent of queries were answered through its ever-grow­ing data­base and AI capabilities. 

The scope of the project has no bounds, Cord added, and he expects the app to not only assist 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.”