NTT DOCOMO Ventures Invests in Inbenta — Will Enhance NTT Communications’ AI Business in Japanese Market —

This month, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President & CEO, Toshiki Nakayama) has invested in Inbenta Technologies Inc. (headquartered in Foster City, California, USA; CEO, Jordi Torras), a Silicon Valley-based company that specializes in natural language processing (NLP) and semantic search engine technologies.
NTT Communications Corporation (headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President & CEO, Tetsuya Shoji), an ICT company within the NTT Group, will strengthen their AI business by collaborating with Inbenta.

NTT Communications launched the service brand COTOHA Chat & FAQ^TM in January 2017, leveraging Inbenta’s semantic search engine. NTT Communications is the licensed exclusive reseller of Inbenta products in Japan. COTOHA Chat & FAQ, which has been improved through integration with Inbenta’s AI technology and NTT Group solutions, offers a customer chat-support system and FAQ database-generating service.
With this investment, additional functions for connecting to various SaaS solutions are anticipated in the future. Furthermore, NTT Communications will continue enhancing the value of COTOHA Chat & FAQ by collaborating with advanced technologies in the NTT Group.

About Inbenta’s semantic search engine
Inbenta’s semantic search engine understands what customers say, rather than just scanning for keywords, to deliver faster, more accurate results. Also, it can identify misspelled words in search queries and complete the search with the user’s intended word. Thus, Inbenta is able to show the information that customers want with an unprecedented rate of success. These technologies have also been applied to their conversational chatbot. The Inbenta Chatbot is available 24/7 to ease the strain on customer support centers and allows customers to receive answers to their questions whenever they want. This is one of many ways that Inbenta improves customer satisfaction and reduces support costs.

About COTOHA Chat & FAQ
COTOHA Chat & FAQ, a service for enterprises that is capable of understanding natural spoken and written language, is integrated with Inbenta’s semantic search engine. The method of its semantic search engine gives customers more accurate answers than keyword-match-type services. It also helps to reduce the time to search answers in websites and to increase self-service rates. As a result, companies can streamline their customer-support operations.
The service engages customers on multiple interfaces, including chatbot, FAQ searches, inquiry forms and the LINE app, according to customers’ needs. Additionally, it provides a dashboard to analyze and extract trends regarding inquiries from customers, insights based on search histories and rates of appropriate answers, which helps to improve customer satisfaction.