While Apple users have Siri, Android users can talk to Google Now and Windows Phone users have Cortana, there's another personal assistant that could blow both all those helpers out of the water.
The new artificial intelligence platform is called Amelia and it is set to be launched after completing successful pilots with a variety of businesses.
Amelia is geared toward technology help desks, contact centers and helping field engineers, though it can complete a number of other business processes.
The new platform goes above and beyond other virtual assistant platforms in a number of ways. First of all, it can understand semantics of language and is able to solve problems in the same way a human can. Starting with the same manuals as humans would, it can "read" 300 problems in only 30 seconds and then learns through observing interactions between human agents and customers. The platform has been in development for a whopping 10 years.
"It's been a long journey. We spent the first decade of our journey trying to do justice to the outcomes of human cognition," said Ergun Ekici, VP of emerging technologies at IPsoft. "Looking at how are we able to do things like reasoning, understanding, learning, leveraging our posterior and anterior cortex. The science was complicated enough that we wrote no code for the first decade."
If the system can't answer a particular question, it is then hands the customer off to a human, although it remains in the conversation to learn how to solve the problem in the future.
Amelia is not only for businesses. It can understand 20 languages and the context of particular sentences. Amelia can even understand emotions through language pattern recognition. If a customer is upset, Amelia can change its responses accordingly.
The difference between Amelia and other artificial intelligence systems is that rather than imitate how humans speak and act, Amelia is attempting to understand it.
"We didn't achieve powered flight by copying birds," said (subscription required) Chetan Dube, president of IPSoft. "First, we had to understand the principles of flight."
One place that Amelia could really excel is in a call center, aiming to provide the same correct answer every time someone calls looking for it. Amelia will know this correct answer by learning from humans.
