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AI-powered customer support robots bring human touch to virtual world

AI-powered customer support robots bring human touch to virtual world

Fusing human psychology with an advanced artificial intelligence engine, MyCyberTwin’s virtual humans are being used by organisations like NASA and National Australia Bank to improve their customer support levels.

AMP's CyberTwin, Sam.

AMP's CyberTwin, Sam.

In contrast, the CyberTwin is able to remember on average 2000 points of customer-relevant information, and 100-150 profile variables -- nuances about the individual being spoken to, such as the preferred formality of address and past conversation topics -- to create its life-like responses.

“Unlike a dumb FAQ, or search engine, the CyberTwin will ask to let it help you. It will ask you a couple of questions to figure out how technically savvy you are, then go down a long path profiling you all the time based on the conversation,” she says.

Along with its learning capabilities, strong language detection capabilities are also a major source of the realism. Using a translation engine, the platform can handle slang, abbreviated queries, misspellings and translate it to standard English, Capper says.

“Our first 20,000 CyberTwins spent a lot of time in social networking in places like MySpace where the language is barely distinguishable as English,” she says. “If the CyberTwin comes across something it hasn’t encountered before it can look at all the words in the sentence, weight them, then make a very accurate guess at the meaning.”

In a deployment for ACP magazines, part of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, MyCyberTwin deployed CyberTwins as the Web personalities of a number of magazine titles for readers to talk to and interact with, Capper says. The results were surprising.

“They put human photos on the robots and didn’t identify themselves as being AI’s, and 95 percent of users on those sites could not work out they were AI’s,” Capper says. “So, we’ve never bothered entering the Turing test [the test to gauge a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence] as we have had the opportunity to do it with clients in real life, which is a better test than a bunch of computer scientists trying to fool your AI.

“Even among enterprise clients, between 67 and 95 percent of their customers feel that the AI’s are human. Even when it is identified as automated chat, people still choose to interact with the AI as if it was a human.”

A big part of the realism of CyberTwins is their ability to provide realistic, intelligent responses to human queries. If for example, a customer is using aggressive language or is abusing a CyberTwin, it can detect this and push back, like a real person.

“If robots are too submissive -- ‘yes, sir you’re right’, ‘I’m sorry sir’-- then what is that going to teach the human about how they can deal with the organisation?” Capper says. “If they get a real human on the phone, how are they going to deal with them? We train the CyberTwin to ask that such language not be used. If they push back, then it is more realistic.”

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Tags NASANABMyCyberTwinAIPBLvirtual humans

More about AMPASAetworkNABNASANational Australia BankPhoenixPublishing and Broadcasting

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