The best way to understand Sia is to draw a parallel with Apple’s personal assistant, Siri. Similarly, the Sia virtual advisor utilizes a natural language interface to understand and respond to your questions. Simply enter your question briefly and clearly and Sia will return responses for you review based on the postings in Refining Online’s Q&A and knowledge base. Select the best responses and dive further into the relevant information.

Sia was built on Astron International’s Delfin platform which employs the latest developments in cognitive applications and natural language processing.

The Delfin platform allows a company to create its own Sia virtual advisor tailored to the company’s documented in-house propriety knowledge and expertise. Once trained, Sia knows the company’s domain, its proprietary information, learns over time, and understands questions and provides answers in natural language.

Sia can be customized using Delfin to exploit your company’s treasure of reports, papers, and other forms of textual information, collectively called unstructured data. Accessing unstructured data has traditionally been limited to the elementary and unappealing search capabilities of document management applications. While there are many conventional data analysis technologies to tackle structured numeric data residing in databases, there were few and limited options until Sia to tap the expertise and intelligence hidden in volumes of your unstructured data.

This advanced capability of Sia can create a significant competitive advantage for companies allowing their employees to make better decisions faster. This is an opportunity as well as an emerging competitive dynamic one cannot ignore.