I was fooled by A.I.? Getting confused with who’s on the phone… Is that a human or a machine?
One time, knowing that there are engineers created Kobe Bryant’s voice by artificial intelligence, I first feel that how powerful A.I. is.
As a huge fan of Kobe Bryant, I started to imagine if technology could bring him back to life someday. If it is possible, we can bring back other celebrities who passed away.
Talking to A.I. CS
Received a strange call by chance this afternoon, the woman caller kept asking me questions. I did not realize that she was not a real human staff as her voice sounded so natural until my little monster wanted to have some more conversation with her. When I spoke something off-topic, she used the same content to reply to my question. So, she is not a real human?
Voice technology of Voicebot
This makes me curious and therefore I searched some relative contents. Most of the call centres use technology to make outbound calls, for example, CCS and VRS to track and record the data to assist the CS officers to free them from communicating with clients or sorting out records. Though IVR is commonly used. but most of them are only recording. The intonation is unnatural, it seems like they are intimidating the way of how a robot speaks. So, how does a robot actually speak? I went on searching and found that there are many voices generated by Artificial Intelligence. You could visit Sound Cloud to listen to the A.I. voice.
One of the key technology of A.I. Ambassador is Text-to-speech (TTS Engine). You could simply generate neutral speech after you pre-design a script. However, Real-time TTS is needed if the Voicebot could react instantly differently according to the question. Moreover, NLG is needed if you want to create something similar to Apple Siri. Apparently, Siri’s answers are set. When you ask similar questions to Siri, she will keep repeating her answers. Looking forward to when NLG technology is well developed that A.I. could answer you differently according to various situations, time, or even emotion. (Maybe we will enjoy chatting with A.I. at that time?)
How could a Voicebot understand human language?
Natural Language Understanding NLU is the secret of how Voicebot could understand human language. NLU is not only finding the keywords in the sentence, but finding the entity and intention, and then search for the answer that matches the most. So, A.I. cannot really ‘think’ like a human although it seems to be able to understand human language. It reminds me of a test, which is about identifying if an object can think, done by Turing in 1950. Since we could not identify what is ‘Artificial Intelligence’, if a machine can have a conversation with human, and the human could not identify it is a machine or not, then the machine will be defined as having intelligence.
With the widening usage of artificial intelligence in different industries, the calls that use A.I. to make is gaining. Sooner or later, someday we could not distinguish between human and machine, A.I. CS will provide us a spectacular service journey to us. Maybe the one who walks beside you is A.I.
