Gnosis Arts Media Group recently announced to they will “soon be launching Ask a PRofessor (TM), a real time Q & A service that will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Ask A PRofessor utilizes IM, SMS and the Twitter API – along with the assistance of a real, live professor – provide answers to public relations questions, in real time, round the clock.”

Eric Bryant, director of Gnosis noted, “What makes this service unique, I think, is that our clients as well as prospective customers will be able to get answers to virtually any PR question they have, in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days week… We will be growing our database of semantically-interpreted questions and answers so that, over time, the answers will become richer, more comprehensive and more specific to the questioner’s needs.”

The article continues, “If the ‘real’ professor is not online, the chat box status will say ‘offline’ – and here’s where the magic begins. When the professor is offline, users will receive answers – this time free of charge – in one of four ways: via text message, via instant message (IM), via Twitter, or via a wiki forum. If the user elects to use text or IM, the answer will be delivered within seconds. But how does the service know what the user’s question is about? ‘This is made possible by our understanding of semantic web ontologies,’ Bryant said. ‘We scripted SMS and IM apps using these ontologies to deliver relevant automated answers based on interpreting the key words and phrases contained in the questions.’”

Image: Courtesy Gnosis Arts Media Group