Before too long, most organizations will find themselves inundated with multiple types of cognitive computing applications accessed via bots capable of supporting multiple types of conversational interfaces.
IPsoft this week at a Digital Workforce Summit event unveiled an updated Amelia bot that can now make decisions based on new data in real time, in addition to being able to now converse in over 40 different languages.
Company CEO Chetan Dube says the ability to analyze data in real time is crucial to giving Amelia the ability to engage in a conversational dialogue with an end user. In fact, Dube says, IPsoft is deliberating giving Amelia a human countenance to encourage humans to interact with it. Longer term, Dube says it’s now only a matter of time before Amelia, in the form of a three-dimensional interface, is embedded in a robot that resembles a humanoid.
“The range of movement for robots is starting to increase considerably,” says Dube. “Within the next nine years, will be able to embed a three-dimensional bot interface in a robot.”
As part of a first step in achieving that goal, IPsoft this week also announced it is setting up a Cognitive Technology Innovation Center in collaboration with Penn State University. For now, Dube says, cognitive computing applications based on Amelia have been becoming production applications within customer service environments, including IT help desks, at a rapid clip in the last year. Thus far, IPsoft claims Amelia has engaged in more than 80,000 conversations, and resolved 69 percent of those queries on its own.
Dube says that in time, different classes of cognitive computing applications will be employed across varied use cases. Applications based on the Apple Siri bot tend to focus more on performing, for example, secretarial tasks. IBM Watson applications are focused more on analytics. Dube says all these bots and applications will eventually be integrated in a way that allows them to leverage each other’s core capabilities.
As an early pioneer of cognitive computing applications, IPsoft doesn’t always generate as much cognitive computing buzz as IBM. But in terms of creating actual applications capable of automating a wide array of tasks, IPsoft is a lot further down this path than most.