The Spanish ICT company Anboto, creator of the first fifth generation virtual assistant, has been selected to become a member of the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which includes companies such as Google, Yahoo, Adobe and IBM.

Anboto will be a contributor to one of the current projects being led by the director of W3C, Tim Berners (inventor of the HTML language): the semantic web. This will be the future of the Internet, and the W3C will point the way, showing those who wish to evolve in Internet how they should move forward.

And what differentiates Anboto from other developers, in order for the company to gain entry to this exclusive club?

The company’s virtual assistant is able to understand a message sent from the user to the computer, establish a natural dialogue, a free dialogue, not monitored, allowing communication to take place that helps achieve the goal for which the service is designed (a sale, answer a question, consult a catalogue of products…). This is in contrast to systems used until now, which only recognize what the user says when the words used coincide with what is programmed into the system.

Anboto’s program uses ontological analysis of the words introduced by the user, processing the possible meanings.

For example, the Spanish word ‘mañana’ has at least two different meanings: it may refer to a part of the day (‘morning’), or it may refer to the next day (‘tomorrow’); ‘querer’ in Spanish may mean to ‘want’ (to buy something), or to ‘love’ a person. The system is able to tell these different meanings apart.

Further, the system automatically determines the user’s language, and uses it to respond.

In addition to this acknowledgement, the company’s work has been recognized by the prestigious technology consulting firm Gartner Group.

The United States is one of Anboto’s main objectives, and the company recently opened an office in Boston. From this base Anboto aims to penetrate the banking, airline, tourism, contact centers, on-line shopping and education sectors.