Kngine is a natural language mobile app whose purpose is to answer any question the user may have. If that sounds a lot like Apple’s personal concierge Siri, it is not by accident. Kngine’s co-founder and CEO Haytham ElFadeel is quite happy to make the comparison. Kngine does differ in that the Knowledge Engine’s goal is not the same as Siri’s. Apple’s voice activated service is a great way to run a lot of iPhone functions by speaking to the smartphone hands free but when fact based questions are used, Siri goes to Wolfram Alpha to get the job done. This is where Kngine excels, by taking fact based questions and giving accurate answers.
ElFadeel has made sure that his company’s product is differentiated from the increasing number of competitors. This is why an independent consultant was hired to compare Kngine, Siri and Evi based on NIST guidelines. The results were fairly impressive and Kngine got 54 percent of the test questions right while Siri and Evi scored 26 percent and 25 percent respectively. Version 2.0, which has yet to be released in the wild was even more impressive with a 71 percent of questions answered correctly.
Kngine works in some way like Wolfram Alpha and crawls the web to gain knowledge. This is not the same crawling that Google uses to index all the pages available on the web. Right now Kngine has head quarters in Cairo, Egypt and ElFadeel has made a move to San Francisco Bay. He is developing a business development team and has raised $275,000 from investors like Sawari Ventures.
For now the company is looking to develop its user base. The monetization methods will eventually be applied to the business model. Methods may include licensing the technology or running ads in the app.
Source: TechCrunch