Virtual assistants are growing ever more popular, with tech companies investing more time and research into them. They are now a staple to any new mobile phone model on the market. The President of information and computing sciences at SRI International, William Mark is now creating virtual assistants to assist client’s complete tasks in shopping, banking and business.
If you ask virtual assistants like SIRI for example, “transfer £200 to my personal account” SIRI will look up “transfer” on the internet and provide you with a host of information from sites like Wikipedia – virtual assistants are great at knowing a lot about a lot of things. Virtual specialists are going to be able to assist you with a specific aspect of your personal or business life.
A platform has been built by SRI that makes it easier for these virtual specialists to benefit different industries, be it by an app or company’s website or to be built in physically at a shop.
William Mark said that the aim is to improve the customer experience “When you try to do anything complicated in real life, you’re going to be involved in a conversation of some kind. When we design these computer systems, not only do they need to know about banking but they also need to know how to have a conversation, where new intents are introduced.” If these bots are to be able to be used in banking, the need to be able to have the capability for deeper conversation. If a client wants to transfer money between two accounts, the specialist bot needs to know which account to transfer the money from and be able to answer questions like “How much do I have in my savings?”
There are several virtual specialist bots hitting the market with SRI spinoff company Kasisto releasing myKAI. MyKAI understands over 1000 banking terms and is able to answer questions and provide financial information and advice but is unable to carry out tasks.
“AI is a very fast-moving field,” Mark said. Progress in deep learning and core machine learning algorithms have led to amazing results in areas including vision and speech. The amount of data researchers can access today has also changed the field dramatically, he said, by providing insight for practical solutions. Things are changing dramatically, and we are just at the very beginning of AI becoming useful to people, and lots of real world applications,” Mark said. “It’s a great area to go into.”
Whilst the applications for virtual specialists are endless and we are undoubtedly going to see a rise in the use and availability of them. It is unlikely however that they will completely replace humans in their application, people like to talk to people and that won’t change.
Get a quote now