New product offers 15x faster development, native support for 72 languages, and ability to integrate with web, mobile and social channels for a seamless digital customer experience

Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and deployment technologies, today announced the availability of Progress® NativeChat™, the artificial intelligence-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots. Unlike other chatbot technologies, NativeChat is based on patent pending CognitiveFlow™ technology that can be trained with goals, examples and data from existing backend systems, similar to the process for training new customer service agents. With NativeChat, organisations can now easily give their customers the ability to converse and transact in a natural way, on the channel of their choice, without the need for human interaction.

Chatbots solve many pressing customer service challenges for organisations— freeing overloaded call center employees to focus on critical business needs by offloading transactional requests, reduction in cost, increased customer satisfaction, and more. However, the creation and deployment of chatbots can be complex, with limited results, if not done right. NativeChat removes many of the complexities of chatbot development, speeding time to market, because of its ability to self-learn as interactions evolve.

“Chatbots are most powerful when they are intelligent and context-aware, directly pulling data and insights from systems of record,” said Dmitri Tcherevik, Chief Technology Officer, Progress. “NativeChat makes it easy to create chatbots on top of existing systems that interact with users in a natural way and improve contextual understanding, accuracy and forecasting in conversations.”

NativeChat can be integrated into self-service web portals and mobile apps, enabling customer self-service across any channel. Customers can also communicate using NativeChat through social channels such as Facebook messenger and other live chat technologies, furthering their ability to engage in the ways that they are most comfortable. NativeChat also integrates with any enterprise system that supports REST APIs.

“We evaluated several chatbot technologies and selected Progress NativeChat because of the Cognitive Flow technology enabling the bot to hold human-like discussions,” said Harry Singh, Global Vice President – PowerCurve Software Products at Experian. “We were able to build our proof of concept digital chatbot in just weeks. Given this early success, and our focus on technology that transforms the way we do business, we’ll be looking at NativeChat as the potential platform for our new robo-agent service.”

Progress NativeChat can:

• Support both transactional and FAQ-style interactions
• Understand natural conversations in 72 human languages, and comes with an optional built-in Natural Language Processing engine powered by Facebook
• Replicate existing web and mobile forms
• Be trained from existing FAQ pages and materials
• Be up and running in as little as two weeks and is as simple to train as a service agent
• Adapt, learn and review chat history without developer support
• Easily integrate with any enterprise systems supporting REST APIs
• Integrate out-of-the-box with the Progress Kinvey serverless cloud application platform
• Integrate out-of-the-box with the Progress Sitefinity web content management platform and the NativeScript native mobile application development technology

NativeChat is the first product to come out of Progress Labs, the innovation incubator inside of Progress.  Progress Labs enables the best and most innovative ideas coming from anywhere within the company to be nurtured and funded, driving innovation in the Progress portfolio and delivering new value for Progress customers and partners. Other Progress Labs projects currently being pursued involve augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, edge computing for IoT, new AI-based applications, and more.

Progress NativeChat is available today. For details, please go to https://www.progress.com/nativechat.