Dixio, X-Ray and the future of encyclopaedia and dictionary publishers

Last week Amazon presented X-ray, a new feature for its devices. The service provides access to what they have called "the bones of the book": encyclopaedic information from Wikipedia and websites such as Shelfari, about the concepts and characters of the book the user is reading. 

Along similar lines, the Spanish Semantix company offers an innovative technology known as Dixio e-reader solution. It is an intelligent dictionary that provides the most appropriate definition of words according to their context; it consults different dictionaries and encyclopaedias at the same time. Dixio is integrated in the recently launched Movistar ebook bq and you only have to touch a word twice to instantly see its definition.

The difference between the two services is that Dixio enables dictionary and encyclopaedia publishers to add their content, providing them with a digitisation format. Publishers can thus ensure that they are present in the digital world. On the other hand, X-ray is currently unable to offer external content for purchase. 

With Dixio, the user can improve his or her reading experience by purchasing dictionaries and encyclopaedias from online bookstores. They are automatically and intelligently integrated with what the user’s device already contains and can be queried by merely touching a word in an e-book. Dixio provides the definition of idioms, compound nouns or encyclopaedic information about the names of people or places, for example. This opens up a world of possibilities for marketing dictionaries and encyclopaedias in digital format, either for local use or via the Internet. 

Dixio’s most outstanding feature is its ability to provide a word’s meaning according to its context. Because “take” does not mean the same thing in “take after” as in “take advantage of “, and “tail” does not mean the same thing in “dog’s tail” as in “on my tail”. When you touch “take” or “tail” in these expressions, Dixio analyses the context, detects the language and immediately provides the best definition or translation in a pop-up window. Dixio uses the Sematix language engine to perform this analysis, integrating both linguistic processes and Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence processing components.