Hello, This Is Artificial Intelligence. How Can I Help You? Eye on A.I.
People who call companies to ask questions about their cable bills or complain about their Internet service being out are increasingly talking to artificial intelligence.
Natural language processing, a subset of A.I. that helps computers understand speech, has become good enough that it’s being used to listen and respond to basic customer questions.
Over the past year, Google, Amazon and business software firm Twilio have all ramped up their marketing of A.I.-powered software for call centers. Their sales pitch is that the technology can handle customer service calls more quickly while freeing human agents to handle more complicated questions.
Less discussed publicly, at least, is that A.I. will also likely let companies save money by reducing the number of call center workers that they need.
In fact, customer service, which includes call center technology, is one of the most common arenas for using A.I., tech publisher O’Reilly Media said in a report earlier this year. Only research and development ranked higher.
The path to this point hasn’t exactly been smooth. Three years ago, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google started touting voice-based digital assistants and online chatbots.
They said that their A.I. could handle complex tasks, like reading users’ calendars, identifying their travel schedules, and then proactively booking them hotel rooms for those dates. But the technology failed to live up the hype.
Since then, A.I. has improved, explained Olive Huang, a vice president of research for analyst firm Gartner. Although it still has room for improvement, the technology is now good enough for some simpler tasks like booking a hotel room when asked.
Companies are increasingly ready to give A.I. another chance, Huang said. That’s particularly true, she said, because customer call volume is rising quickly and increasing staffing to handle it is expensive.
Still, natural language processing has its limits. For instance, the technology often fails to understanding people with certain accents.
“My accent has always been impossible for Amazon Alexa,” said Huang, who described her voice in English as a blend of Singaporean Chinese and German.
Additionally, companies are still figuring out how to smoothly transition callers from digital assistants to human operators. People invariably speak differently based on who or what they’re talking to.
“If I know I’m talking to a human, then I will talk like a human,” Huang said. “If I know I’m talking to a virtual agent, then it’s like talking to a five-year old—I will be precise.”
And while some voice technologies are increasingly sounding more human-like by incorporating “umms” and pauses, people can find this “creepy,” she said. When a virtual assistant sounds too human, “then you don’t know how to talk to it,” Huang said.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com