Ramanathan V. Guha, a technical fellow at Microsoft, believes we are in the midst of the fourth revolution in personal computing, characterized by the ability to communicate with applications using free-form language. He is not thrilled, however, with the idea of the web being dominated by chatbots, which he argues extract all their knowledge but provide no return value. To address this, Guha has created NLWeb, an open protocol for the web that allows any website or app owner to incorporate AI-driven interaction features akin to ChatGPT.
With just a few lines of NLWeb code, the selection of an AI model, and the provision of relevant data, a custom chatbot can be set up within minutes. The protocol allows for a natural-language question to be posed, with the answer returned in a structured form. NLWeb handles all the logistics of transforming a question into an answer, with the website or app owner simply providing the data. The system is designed to be limited to the platform and its specific area of expertise, potentially creating a tool far superior to a general-purpose chatbot.
Guha demonstrated NLWeb’s capabilities with a few examples. In one case, he used the search box of a food website to request ‘sp