ABOUT THE PROJECT

Νowadays, the most frequent channels of communication and customer care of businesses or public  organizations are physical stores or offices, which require the presence of the customer / citizen, call  centers that require a large amount of human resources from the organization and the official websites of  these organizations which are often complex and difficult to use by specific population groups. The Pythia  project aims to develop a new generation of electronic communication and transaction channels, which  operate in natural language and aim at personalized digital services provision accessible to all, eliminating  social exclusion and digital divide. To this end, the project capitalizes on the momentum of chatbots, which  are intelligent agents that adapt human conversations and build on the new generation of the internet. The  primary objective of the project is to significantly improve the functionality of bots in terms of quality of  communication with end users and the level of provided services, developing a specialized understanding  infrastructure understanding the Greek language. The development of the infrastructure is based on the  use of natural language processing technologies (NLP), combined with the application of machine learning  techniques and the incorporation of Discourse Analysis and Reasoning. The integration of these research  prototypes, on a single platform, supports the operation of the new business model “Bots-as-a-Service and its commercial exploitation.  

Through the collaboration of two research organizations, four companies and a public organization,  Pythia’s research results will be adopted and evaluated through applications in four sectors of high  importance for the Greek economy (Business Transactions, Banking, Tourism, Public Services). Partner  organizations operating in the above sectors will adopt PYTHIA tools to create a new set of innovative  interactive multimodal services (transforming existing or designing new ones) for their clients (or citizens).  The services will be offered seamlessly through the bot, which will guide the user in all the steps of  operation. The resulting services will cover both services provided exclusively by a partner (e.g.  information services) and complex services that combine interaction between the two or more or third party  systems and (e.g. transactions execution).