Most of us are hardwired to hate not speaking directly to a human when we have a problem—following years of irritating voicemail systems. However, perhaps the only thing worse is being on hold for an uncertain amount of time due to overwhelmed call centres.

Chatbots have come a long way and can now quickly handle most queries within minutes. Where a human is required, the reduced demand through using virtual agent technology (VAT) means customers can get the assistance they need more quickly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly increased the adoption of VAT as businesses seek to maintain customer service through such a challenging time.

According to IBM’s study, 99 percent of organisations reported increased customer satisfaction by integrating virtual agents. Human agents also report increased satisfaction and IBM says those “who feel valued and empowered with the proper tools and support are more likely to deliver a better experience to customers.”

68 percent of leaders cite improving the human agent experience as being among their key reasons for adopting VAT. There’s also economic incentive, with the cost of replacing a dissatisfied agent who leaves a business estimated at as much as 33 percent of the exiting employee’s salary.

IBM claims that VAT performance in the past has only been studied through individual case studies. The company set out, alongside Oxford Economics, to change that by surveying 1,005 respondents from companies using VAT daily.

Businesses wondering whether virtual assistants are worth the investment may be interested to know that 96 percent of the respondents “exceeded, achieved, or expect to achieve” their anticipated return.

On average, companies which have implemented VAT have increased their revenue by three percent.

IBM is one of the leading providers of chatbots through its Watson Assistant solution. While there’s little reason to doubt the claims made in the report, it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s not entirely unbiased.

Watson Assistant has gone from strength-to-strength and appears to have been among the few things which benefited from the pandemic. Between February and August, Watson Assistant usage increased by 65 percent.

You can download a full copy of IBM’s report here.

(Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash)

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Even as a Brit, it can often feel like a translation app is needed between Bristolian, Geordie, Mancunian, Brummie, Scottish, Irish, or any of the other regional dialects in the country. For a geographically small country, we’re a diverse bunch – and US-made voice assistants often struggle with even the slightest accent.

The BBC thinks it can do a better job than the incumbents and first announced its plans to build a voice assistant called ‘Beeb’ in August last year.

Beeb is being trained using the BBC’s staff from around the country. As a public service, the institution aims to offer as wide representation as possible which is reflected in its employees.

The broadcaster also believes that Beeb addresses public concerns about voice assistants; primarily that they collect vast amounts of data for commercial purposes. As a taxpayer-funded service, the BBC does not rely on things like advertising.

“People know and trust the BBC,” a spokesperson told The Guardian last year, “so it will use its role as public service innovator in technology to ensure everyone – not just the tech-elite – can benefit from accessing content and new experiences in this new way.”

An early version of Beeb is now available for testing by UK participants of the Windows Insider program. Microsoft is heavily involved in the Beeb assistant as the company’s Azure AI services are being used by the BBC.

The first version of Beeb allows users to do virtual assistant norms like getting weather updates and the news, access radio and podcasts, and even grab a few jokes from BBC Comedy writers and facts from QI host Sandi Toksvig.

According to the broadcaster, Beeb won’t launch on dedicated hardware but instead will be designed to eventually be implemented in smart speakers, TVs, and mobiles.

While it still has a long way to go to take on the capabilities of Google, Alexa, Siri, and others, Beeb may offer a compelling alternative for accent-heavy Brits that struggle with American voice assistants.

Grab the Beeb app from the Microsoft Store here.

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Digital assistants like Alexa and Siri are programmed to pick up keywords and provide scripted responses. Google has previously demonstrated its work towards a more natural conversation with its Duplex project but Meena should offer another leap forward.

Meena is a neural network with 2.6 billion parameters. Google claims Meena is able to handle multiple turns in a conversation (everyone has that friend who goes off on multiple tangents during the same conversation, right?)

Google published its work on e-print repository arXiv on Monday in a paper called “Towards a Human-like Open Domain Chatbot”.

A neural network architecture called Transformer was released by Google in 2017 which is widely acknowledged to be among the best language models available. A variation of Transformer, along with a mere 40 billion English words, was used to train Meena.

Google also debuted a metric alongside Meena called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA) which measures the ability of agents to maintain a conversation.

Meena scores 79 percent using the new SSA metric. For comparison, Mitsuku – a Loebner Prize-winning AI agent developed by Pandora Bots – scored 56 percent.

The result of Meena brings its conversational ability close to that of humans. On average, humans score around 86 percent using the SSA metric.

We don’t yet know when Google intends to debut Meena’s technology in its products but, as the digital assistant war heats up, we’re sure the company is as eager to release it as we are to use it.

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Due to US trade restrictions, Huawei is losing access to Google’s services. The new Mate 30 smartphones announced in Munich today will launch with the open-source Android, but it will not feature the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, Google Pay, or the many other services which Western consumers are used to.

Among the features that will be missing from the Mate 30 onwards is Google Assistant. Huawei is quickly working to fill the gaps left without access to Google’s services with its own and is launching the Huawei Assistant as a replacement for Mountain View’s virtual assistant.

Walter Ji, Director of Business, HUAWEI Consumer Business Group Western Europe, said:

“With our focus on user experience, we bring AI into mobile services so we can proactively identify user needs and thus improve their smartphone experience.

Huawei Assistant is a product that intelligently fulfils user needs at the same time as offering partners an opportunity to provide their services to users through a globally-available distribution platform.”

Huawei Assistant will launch with basic functionality compared to Google’s version, but the company is promising to expand it.

By swiping to the right of the homescreen, much like accessing Google Assistant today, users can begin interacting with Huawei Assistant. The service is powered by Huawei Ability Gallery, a service distribution platform.

There are four key features of the Huawei Assistant:

• Newsfeed – Today’s Google Assistant provides some personalised articles when you swipe to it on an Android device. The newsfeed feature is Huawei Assistant’s alternative but users can decide whether to receive custom recommendations or to select from news agencies to fill their feed with “up-to-the-minute” articles.
• Search – Users can search for information on their smartphone using Huawei Assistant. The assistant will surface things such as installed apps, memos, emails, and calendar entries, while also providing an online search feature using the default browser.
• Instant Access – Four shortcuts to a user’s choice of applications can be selected for quick access. In the future, Huawei says this can make use of AI so the shortcuts are intelligently-selected based on what the user may want at that moment.
• SmarterCare – Real-time information will be provided using AI. At launch, this will mean things such as the weather forecast, missed calls, and schedule reminders. Future planned functionality will enable more powerful abilities like booking restaurants, flights, taxis, and hotels.

The new assistant from Huawei will be pre-installed on Mate 30 series devices but it will also be downloadable from the company’s App Gallery.

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Current digital assistants listen for a wakeword such as “Ok, Google” or “Alexa,” before recording speech for processing. Especially for companies such as Google and Amazon which thrive on knowing everything about users, this helps to quell privacy concerns.

There are some drawbacks from this approach, mainly context. Future AI assistants will be able to provide more help when armed with information leading up to the request.

For example, say you were discussing booking a seat at your favourite restaurant next Tuesday. After asking, “Alexa, do I have anything on my schedule next Tuesday?” it could respond: “No, would you like me to book a seat at the restaurant you were discussing and add it to your calendar?”

Today, such a task would require three separate requests.

Amazon’s patent isn’t quite as complex just yet. The example provided in the filing envisions allowing the user to say things such as “Play ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ Alexa, by the Beatles,” (Note the wakeword after the play song command.)

David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said:

“Many Amazon Alexa users will likely be alarmed by today’s news that the company’s latest patent would allow the devices – commonplace in homes across the UK – to record everything a person says before even being given a command. Whilst the patent doesn’t suggest it will be installed in future Alexa-enabled devices, this still signals an alarming development in the further surrender of our personal privacy.

Given the amount of sensitive information exchanged in the comfort of people’s homes, Amazon would be able to access a huge volume of personal information – information that would be of great value to cybercriminals and threat actors. If the data isn’t secured effectively, a successful breach of Amazon’s systems could have a severe knock-on effect on the data security and privacy of huge numbers of people.

If this patent comes into effect, consumers need to be made very aware of the ramifications of this – and to be fully briefed on what data is being collected, how it is being used, and how they can opt out of this collection. Amazon may argue that analysing stored data will make their devices smarter for Alexa owners – but in today’s digital era, such information could be used nefariously, even by trusted parties. For instance, as we saw with Cambridge Analytica, public sector bodies could target election campaigns at those discussing politics.

There’s a world of difference between temporary local storage of sentences, to determine if the command word has been used, and bulk retention of data for long periods, or permanently – even if the listening process is legitimate and consumers have opted in. There have already been criticisms of Amazon for not making it clear what is being recorded and stored – and we are concerned that this latest development shows the company moving in the wrong direction – away from data visibility, privacy, and consent.”

There’s a joke about Uber that society used to tell you not to get into cars with strangers, and now you’re encouraged to order one from your phone. Lyft has been able to ride in Uber’s wake relatively negative PR free.

Getting the balance right between innovation and safety can be a difficult task. Pioneers often do things first and face the backlash before it actually becomes somewhat normal. That’s not advocating Amazon’s possible approach, but we’ve got to be careful outrage doesn’t halt progress while remaining vigilant of actual dangers.

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Duplex caused a stir when it debuted at Google’s I/O developer conference last year. The AI was shown calling a hair salon to make a booking and did so complete with human-like “ums” and “ahs”.

The use of such human mannerisms goes to show Google’s intention was for the human to be unaware they’re in conversation with an AI. Following some outcry, Google and other tech giants have pledged to make it clear to humans if they’re not speaking to another person.

Duplex is slowly rolling out and is available for Pixel smartphone owners in the US. Currently, it turns out Duplex bookings are often being carried out by humans in call centres.

Google confirmed to the New York Times that about 25 percent of the Assistant-based calls start with a human in a call centre, while 15 percent require human intervention. Times reporters Brian Chen and Cade Metz made four sample reservations and just one was completed start to finish by the AI.

The practice of using humans as a backup should always be praised. Making this standard practice helps increase trust, reduces concerns about human workers being replaced, and provides some accountability when things go awry.

Only so much can go wrong when booking a hair appointment, but setting expectations now will help to guide developments further down the line.

AI is being increasingly used in a military capacity, and most will sleep better at night knowing a human is behind any final decision rather than complete automation. Just imagine if Soviet officer Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov decided to launch retaliatory nuclear missiles after his early warning system falsely reported the launch of missiles from the US back in 1983.

According to the Times, Google isn’t in a rush to replace the human callers, and that should be welcomed.

Related: Watch our interview with UNICRI AI and Robotics Centre head Irakli Beridze discussing issues like weaponisation and the impact on jobs:

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NHS doctors are overburdened; a problem only getting worse from a growing and ageing population, and not enough funding.

The report was led by US academic Eric Topol and calls for a reskilling of NHS staff to harness new digital skills. AI and robotics can reduce the burden on healthcare professionals, but only if they’re utilised effectively.

Doctors will not be replaced by robots but instead will have their abilities “enhanced” to improve care. Around 90 percent of all NHS jobs are predicted to require digital skills within the next 20 years.

The use of virtual assistants such as those offered by Apple, Google, and Amazon are expected to be among the closest innovations to being ready.

Assistants can help with checking whether symptoms require urgent care, a GP appointment, or whether a doctor needs to be seen at all. This would help prevent the misuse of A&E by people with trivial ailments or the booking of GP appointments for otherwise healthy adults with things such as a common cold.

Virtual assistants could also be used to book and remind of appointments. This would help to reduce the number of unattended appointments that someone else could have needed.

Yet another concept is the use of a ‘mental health triage bot’ that engages in conversations while analysing text and voice for suicidal ideas and emotion. This could help reduce the ~6000 suicides per year.

The main concern preventing uptake is the potential for errors, which in healthcare could be fatal.

AI News previously reported on the findings of NHS consultant ‘Dr Murphy’ who reached out to us after using ‘GP at Hand’ from Babylon Health, an AI-powered service promoted by health secretary Matt Hancock.

Dr Murphy has since posted many flawed experiences with the service, but one example of a “48yr old obese 30/day male smoker develop[ing] sudden onset central chest pain & sweating” suggested booking a GP appointment. Anyone with common sense would say call 999 urgently.

That example could have meant life or death and shows, while such a system could one day provide huge benefits, it must undergo rigorous testing.

Commenting on the report, Hancock said:

Our health service is on the cusp of a technology revolution and our brilliant staff will be in the driving seat when it happens.

Technology must be there to enhance and support clinicians. It has the potential to make working lives easier for dedicated NHS staff and free them up to use their medical expertise and do what they do best: care for patients.”

In the NHS report, it’s claimed the use of virtual assistants could save 5.7 million hours of GP’s time across England per year.

Further AI use cases include speeding up the interpretation of scans; improving accuracy while enabling treatments to begin sooner. We’ve created a dedicated ‘healthcare’ category on AI News highlighting the incredible advances in this area.

When it comes to robotics, their assistance in surgery could be expanded in addition to being used for simple tasks which are important but time-consuming such as dispensing medicines.

Other emerging technologies such as VR also present exciting opportunities. Virtual reality could help with pain reduction and treating mental conditions such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and phobias.

The report’s authors conclude: “Our review of the evidence leads us to suggest that these technologies will not replace healthcare professionals, but will enhance them … giving them more time to care for patients.”

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The research, from Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute, found close to three-quarters (73 percent) of consumers have interacted via AI.

Satisfaction with those who have experienced AI interactions is slightly lower, at 69 percent. Over two-thirds satisfaction is quite surprisingly high, especially when you consider how dissatisfied people typically are with traditional automated systems.

Just over half (55%) of consumers across all age groups want interactions to be a mix of AI and humans, while 64 percent want AIs to be more ‘human-like’ rather than ‘human-looking’.

Interestingly, the fear surrounding AI intellect – likely instilled through sci-fi movies such as Terminator – appears to be decreasing. More than three in five consumers (62%) are now comfortable with an AI featuring human-like intellect.

Where an AI has the desired human-like qualities, almost half (48%) say they feel more goodwill towards a company and would have a greater propensity to spend.

One major benefit the majority (63%) of people felt AI had over humans was its 24/7 availability and how it provides greater control over their interactions.

Back in May, Google showed a demo of its impressive-yet-controversial ‘Duplex’ (now renamed to ‘Duet’) AI system which could make calls on a person’s behalf while sounding like a human. It was shown booking a hair salon appointment with the other person completely unaware they were speaking to an AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08

48 percent of respondents say the opportunity to be able to delegate tasks to an electronic personal assistant is exciting, with another 46 percent believing it will enhance their quality of life.

Despite consumers wanting AI to have human attributes like similar voice (62%) and the ability to understand emotions (57%), they also find them “creepy” and do not want them to appear human.

More than half (52%) of customers are not comfortable when AI is set up to look like a person. The report also finds that two-thirds of consumers (66%) would like to be made aware when companies are enabling interactions via AI.

Some companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have committed themselves to ensuring their AIs identify themselves as such to a human at the beginning of an interaction. Lawmakers are considering legislation to make this a legal obligation.

The research surveyed 10,000 consumers and more than 500 executives at leading organisations across 10 global markets.

You can find a full copy of “The Secret to Winning Customers’ Hearts with AI” here.

What are your thoughts on the results of the report?

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The company first launched its XiaoIce project back in August 2017. In April, Microsoft said it had achieved full duplexing — the ability to speak and listen at the same time, similar to humans.

Microsoft’s announcement was made before Google’s demonstration earlier this month but, unlike Google, the company had nothing to show at the time.

XiaoIce has now been demonstrated in action during a London event:

The chatbot is only available in China at this time, but it’s become incredibly popular with more than 500 million users.

XiaoIce also features over 230 skills and has been used to perform things such as creating news and hosting radio programs as part of its ‘Content Creation Platform’.

In a blog post, Microsoft VP of AI Harry Shum revealed that more than 600,000 people have spoken on the phone with XiaoIce since it launched in August.

“Most intelligent agents today like Alexa or Siri focus on IQ or task completion, providing basic information like weather or traffic,” wrote Shum. “But we need agents and bots to balance the smarts of IQ with EQ – our emotional intelligence.”

“When we communicate, we use tone of voice, word play, and humour, things that are very difficult for computers to understand. However, Xiaoice has the ability to have human-like verbal conversations, which the industry calls full duplex.”

As many have called for since the Duplex demo, and Google has promised, Microsoft ensures a human participant is aware they’re speaking to an AI.

One thing we’d love to see is a conversation between XiaoIce and Google Duplex to see how well they each hold up. However, let’s keep our hands on the kill switch in case world domination becomes a topic.

What are your thoughts on conversational AIs like XiaoIce and Duplex?

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“We want to introduce emotional interactions,” said Felix Zhang, VP of Software Engineering at Huawei, in an interview with CNBC. “We believe that in the future all of our end users will want to interact with the system more passionately.”

If the movie ‘Her’ comes to mind when hearing about Huawei’s plans, executives said they were inspired by the film. The protagonist in Her falls in love with his digital assistant who adapts to his emotional needs.

Today’s interactions with digital assistants like Siri are quick but emotionless and scripted experiences. Huawei wants their future assistant to be able to continue a conversation longer for a more natural and personal discussion.

“Huawei’s new digital assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, will try to continue the talks as long as possible so that the user does not feel he is alone,” said Editor Lu, Director of AI at Huawei’s consumer business group.

The company’s priority continues to be improving the intelligence of its assistant to ensure it’s able to carry out tasks without a user having to touch their devices in many cases.

“The first step is to give your assistant a high IQ, and then you have to give him a high percentage of EQ emotions,” continues Lu.

Prioritising intelligence makes sense, nobody wants a chatty assistant — digital or otherwise — who ultimately cannot do their job.

Do you think adding emotions to digital assistants is a good idea?

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