Reimagine the New AI Service Bot

Our AI service bot can get a lot smarter, are you ready?

@hauntedeyes unsplash.com

Recently, I’ve noticed a shift. The AI service bots that I deal with either over the phone or over the internet seems to be getting smarter. While a few years before, I would be yelling at my phone trying to talk to a “live” customer service representative, nowadays, they forward me promptly to a “live” service representative if my needs are not met.

Good, we are making some headway in using AI to cut down the amount of time I spend on the phone with my service providers.

Can you imagine that AI service bots can get much smarter than this?

There was a time in my career that I worked on the trading floor assisting traders with their system issues. It was tedious to steal just “five more minutes” to gather information from my client’s desktops to diagnose the problem and provide a fix. My clients never enjoyed being interrupted while they were working and I never enjoyed waiting for them to give me “five more minutes”.

On top of that, due to the time-sensitive nature of my job, I burned out easily. After years of working in this type of hectic environment, I ended up with PTSD. Between recurrent dreams of someone losing a lot of money and the guilt that I harbored at not being able to fix every problem, I needed therapy to deal with my burn-out and PTSD.

Imagine if I had an AI robot to gather information for me. I could send this robot to interface with my clients. I could save my time and energy to diagnose the issues to provide a fix. Even though I worked with systems, these systems were complex. When issues occurred, I needed to investigate through many endpoints to diagnose the issue to provide a fix.

Do you see the similarities in the way I resolved these system issues with the way doctors might treat a sick patient?

Our bodies are giant physiological machines that provide us with all the tools to live a better life. In a time-sensitivity environment such as the emergency room, there’s a real need for doctors to move swiftly between cases in order to provide the care necessary for all the patients. Often, there can be more cases than there are doctors on hand to deal with them.

In these situations, you have patients who urgently needed to be cared for sitting in the waiting room. They end up being attended to by a nurse who may not be equipped to handle the situation.

Doctors and nurses who work in emergency rooms often acknowledge that they don’t like to keep the patients waiting. But due to a lack of resources, it’s almost an “accepted” nature of the job to keep some patients waiting while assisting more critical patients.

If you’ve ever been to the emergency room, you know that waiting is inevitable. I’ve in well-staffed city hospital waiting rooms as well as in rural hospitals.

Waiting should not be an “acceptable” part of the service that we provide our customers, particularly when our customers are in pain.

This year, with many AI service bots implemented in real-world settings, applications in healthcare settings now become a possibility. In the healthcare setting, there’s a real need. But, our service bots need to be much smarter to deal with this type of dynamic environment.

Empathy & Understanding

In the sensitive healthcare setting, it is critical to have a robot that can empathize and understand the patient’s dilemma. When a patient is in pain, even if you are asking the patient critical questions in order to care for them, these questions must be spoken with empathy and understanding.

Often, the questions are not yes and no questions. They require the patient to give descriptions of their medical history. If the patient sees the Robot that’s gathering information to be a friendly presence, they are more likely to give the Robot more information. With more information, doctors can provide a more accurate diagnosis. Many patients who come to the emergency room may have mental illnesses, having an empathetic Robotic who can give appropriate feedbacks can be critical.

Currently, there are many service bot companies that are implementing solutions with empathy. Many mental health chatbots that provide therapy to their customers is just one use case of chatbots with empathy.

Emoshape is a company that provides emotion synthesis for AI to understand 64 trillion possible emotional states every 1/10th of a second. Their EPU or emotion chip embedded in service bots can help to take service bots to the next level.

Here’s more detail about how empathy is important in AI.

Reasoning

There are three types of reasoning: deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. In machine learning, inductive reasoning is a very typical approach seen in algorithms such as KNN (K-nearest neighbor) or SVM (Support Vector Machine). On the other hand, deductive reasoning requires many rules and facts. A decision tree algorithm is one that tries to generate rules based on known answers. The third and most powerful reasoning type is abductive reasoning. This is what deep learning uses to reason.

One of the best demonstration of this ability is when AlphaGo beat a human champion. Although AlphaGo’s learning curve is longer, it eventually did beat the human champion.

Combining the power of reasoning for different use cases, different AI service bots can make decisions to help better serve our needs.

For instance, an AI service bot can reason that because you bought these items in the prior month, you may also need these items this month as well. When you are having a bad day, the AI service bot can refrain from judgment and simply try to answer your questions without reacting to your immediate frustration.

Personality

You may think that having a personality might be a weird experience in an AI service bot. But, in fact, empathy and personality are related. In the healthcare setting, when Robots can acquire a unique personality by learning about your responses, then the Robot will be more likely to be able to proactively anticipate your needs.

For instance, if you like humor, wouldn’t you love it if your Robot can tell a joke or two when they are giving your medicine for the day? If you need to take a lot of medication multiple times a day, having a Robot who can help you make the situation easier is essential. It may just help you get through your day.

Research in the area of personality is still going on. But, one of the interesting pieces of research is from the University of South Australia. Researchers have developed a learning algorithm that can reveal your Big Five personality types simply by tracking your eye movements.