Let’s talk artificial intelligence – and for such a ubiquitous topic, we’ll keep the intro short! Since its introduction to the mainstream in 2023, mostly in the form of LLMs (Large Language Models), many businesses and organizations worldwide have prioritized the implementation of AI into their products. And at AdvantageCS, we’ve established a task force to guide our efforts ensuring that any application of AI is secure, useful, and reliable. That second one is important—AI must be useful or it’s frankly just technical noise.
Now, AdvantageCS is proud to announce the release of Porter, our documentation’s new AI assistant!
What is Porter?
Porter’s purpose is simple: assist Advantage’s documentation users in finding the information they’re looking for. Advantage’s documentation is extensive as the application’s capabilities, and an incredible amount of information is available to our users. It boasts a staggering 1.6 million words—double all of Shakespeare’s plays! This means that users can find an answer to almost any Advantage-centric question, but on the other hand, some topics can yield hundreds of pages of search results which can be a challenge.
This is where Porter can help. Instead of performing a “lexical” search which generates search results based on matching similar words, Porter uses natural language processing (NLP) to perform a “vector” search, interpreting the meaning of the search query before finding results with similar definitions.
Once Porter has the correct information, it will reply to the user with a clear, professional response. For example, if a user asks Porter “How do I set up a digital subscription?”, Porter will interpret the question’s meaning, find relevant passages within the documentation, and reply to the user with a bulleted list of setup instructions. It also returns the pages it pulled from allowing the user a more targeted dive into specific pages.
Beyond answering simple questions, Porter’s vector search capabilities also allow it to synthesize information from different parts of the documentation, providing information that isn’t explicitly written in the documentation. For example, suppose a new user wants to learn about similar processes for various types of revenue recognition. If this user asks Porter to compare and contrast these processes, Porter can find information on each process, interpret this information, and respond to the user with its findings.
Porter is also a polyglot! This allows our clients all over the world to interact in their native language without being slowed down by a language barrier. Bringing a conversation-first approach to our documentation will greatly assist our clients in maximizing Advantage’s capabilities.
AdvantageCS’ Porter AI assistant is the newest tool that Advantage users can use to navigate our extensive documentation. We are excited to bring a truly useful AI application to our clients worldwide!