AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality, see...
http://www.smartaction.com/index.html Based on reading the website here is my initial reaction Certainly, automating a higher and higher percentage of call center functionality is a worthy goal, and a place one would expect AGI technology to be able to play a role. Current automated call center systems either provide extremely crude functionality, or else require extensive domain customization prior to each deployment; and they still show serious shortcomings even after such customization, due largely to their inability to interpret the user's statements in terms of an appropriate contextual understanding. The promise AGI technology offers for this domain is the possibility of responding to user statements with the contextual understanding that only general intelligence can bring. The extent to which A2I2 has really solved this very difficult problem, however, is impossible to assess without actually trying the product. What they have might be an incremental improvement over existing technologies, or it might be a quantum leap forward; based on the information provided, there is no way to tell. For example http://www.tuvox.com/ is a quite sophisticated competitor and it would be interesting to see a head to head competition between their system and A2I2's. The available materials tell little about the underlying technology. Claims such as " Functionally, it recognizes speech, understands the caller's meaning and intent, remembers the evolving context of the conversation, and obtains information in real time from databases and websites. " are evocative but could be interpreted in many different ways. Interpreted most broadly, this would imply that A2I2 has achieved a human-level AI system; but if this were the case, there would be better things to do with it than automate call centers. Based on the available information, it's not clear just how narrowly one must interpret these assertions to obtain agreement with the truth. What is clear is that they are taking an adaptive learning based approach rather than an approach based on extensive hand-coding of linguistic resources, which is interesting, and vaguely reminiscent of Robert Hecht-Nielsen's neural net approach to language processing. ben g ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com