Freed.in is an event for open source enthusiasts that is happening in Delhi on the 28-29th of Delhi. It is being organised by The School of Information Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru University (SIT/JNU) and the Delhi Linux User Group (ILUG-D). The event seems to be shaping up quite well and looks like a must-attend for OSS supporters in this part of the country. Sponsors include tech heavyweights – Intel, Google, Sun & Qvantel. The sessions have been organized along different tracks- FOSS, system admin, multimedia & creative tools, collaboration & communication, scientific & research tools, native language computing etc. And this is the tentative list of speakers. The event is free but you need to register beforehand. And just in case you miss it, the tagline in the poster sums up what you should expect there – “Khul Jai Bandh Akal Ka Taala”, a take on the popular lyrics from that evergreen Hindi film song. I’m looking forward to this!

Alabot is a very interesting product idea. It is a bot (a bot is a piece of computer code) that has artificial intelligence (AI) & natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Positioned as an ‘Interactive Intelligent Agent’ it has been ported to instant messengers (mobile/web) and can act as an automated chat application with AI & search/retrieval capabilities. So you can have Alabot as an unmanned IM/chat application on your website to answer simple user queries. Alabot is a product from Xanadutec (a UK & India based company with exposure to BPO, transcription, document mgmt); it has been built up from scratch and is an original product idea (as claimed by them). They are in the process of rolling it out for some initial clients- a travel portal, an e-commerce site and an intelligent SMS based service. Monetization will be based on the specifics of the vertical e.g. for the travel portal, it would be based on a per unique conversation charge. Alabot is currently not for public use; it has been ported to Gtalk for testing- yahoo plugs and jabber plugs are also on the way. Stock quotes / news / location based queries are planned to be built into the bot engine once it goes live.

So how does this work? Actually just like your regular IM, save the fact that it is automated. Check out the screenshot for a demo conversation of a user chatting with Alabot on a job portal while looking for a job. Alabot weaves in AI, NLP & search into its user interactions. I added it to my Gtalk client and tried it out. The result looked robust for a start, though its obvious that intelligence based systems will approach optimal performance only once they have gathered large data sets from actual usage. Alabot could have applications in various online portals for frontend/customer (first point of contact) interactions. And my hunch is that this probably makes more sense for overseas markets that India because of their higher labor/wage rates, making unmanned solutions highly cost-advantageous.