STANDOUT Inc.

STANDOUT Inc. is a software company based in Okayama, Japan. Our product, VATES, is embeddable AI infrastructure for business: developers connect it to their own product through an API, the way they would connect Stripe or Twilio. It also runs out of the box as a hosted service – an embedded widget added with one line of JavaScript, or a standalone chat page.

VATES answers questions from a company’s own knowledge base. What makes it different is what is not inside it. There is no vector database, no embedding step, no re-indexing. Knowledge is held as structured plain text that a person can read and edit directly, and it is interpreted at the moment a question is asked. Edit a line and the change is live immediately. Delete a line and it is gone, verifiably.

A single knowledge base answers each reader in their own language, with no translation data stored at all. The console, the documentation and the website are available in twenty-three languages, and replies are not limited to those twenty-three. Setup, operation, billing, security and editing the knowledge base are all done from the console, which is built to work in your hand on a phone.

Pricing is prepaid and usage-based. No monthly fee, no contract, minimum top-up USD 5.00.

VATES is also informed by an ongoing independent research program led by its developer, Takuya Aoki, on knowledge representation, interpretation, and heterogeneous observer intelligences. Seven public preprints are available through Zenodo and listed in the author’s ORCID research record.