Vectara, an AI-powered conversational search platform, has announced new capabilities that are aimed at improving generative AI for business data. With the new features, Vectara aims to provide summarization of results for a more conversational AI experience. The company is also adding what it calls “grounded generation” capabilities in a bid to help reduce the risk of AI hallucinations and improve overall search accuracy.
Seed round and competition
Vectara has also announced that it has closed a seed round of $28.5 million, which includes $20 million that was previously announced in October 2022. The funding was led by Race Capital, with new strategic board of advisors including Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia.
When Vectara first emerged in 2022, there were few competitors in the generative AI search space. However, in recent months, Google and Microsoft have entered the space with preview of their Generated Search Experience and integrated generative AI, respectively. Elasticsearch has also been expanded to integrate generative AI with an update announced on May 23.
Vectara CEO and cofounder Amr Awadallah is confident in his firm’s differentiation. A core element of the Vectara platform is what is known as a “retrieval engine,” the technology that matches the right semantic concepts with entries in a vector database. Awadallah explained that Vectara has improved on the original design, providing a highly accurate retrieval system.
Generative AI capabilities
Prior to the new update, the search platform provided users with a list of results that benefited from both semantic keyword and AI capabilities. The list of results however was still just a list that a user had to look through to get an answer.
With the platform update, users can now get a generative AI result that will summarize the most relevant sources to provide an answer to a query. The Vectara platform uses what is known as a “zero shot” machine learning (ML) approach that enables the model to continuously learn from new data, without the need for more consuming fine tuning and retraining.
The Vectara platform also uses a grounded generation approach, which other vendors sometimes refer to as retrieval augmented generation. Generated results are associated with a source citation to help improve accuracy and to direct users to more information from the original source.
To help reduce the risk of AI hallucinations, Vectara has integrated grounded generation capabilities. The basic idea is that generated results are associated with a source citation to help improve accuracy and to direct users to more information from the original source.
Overall, Vectara aims to help businesses not just find the right search results, but to deliver actions for end users. Awadallah emphasized that the strategy for his company is to move from search engines to answer engines, and ultimately, to action engines.
“We just want the answer, don’t give me a list of results and I have to go read to figure out what I’m looking for — just give me the answer itself,” said Awadallah.
Vectara’s AI-powered conversational search platform has expanded its capabilities with generative AI that provides summarization of results for a more conversational AI experience. The company is also adding what it calls “grounded generation” capabilities in a bid to help reduce the risk of AI hallucinations and improve overall search accuracy. Vectara has closed a seed round of $28.5 million, which includes $20 million that was previously announced in October 2022. With increasing competition in the generative AI search space, Vectara is confident in its differentiation with a highly accurate retrieval system and grounded generation approach. Vectara aims to help businesses move from search engines to answer engines, and ultimately, to action engines.
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