John Linton .....if it could be made to work effectively in a commercial environment.
I don't know whether you have been following the Watson vs humans Jeopardy TV event in the USA which ended last night:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/15/jeopardy.watson/index.html?hpt=Sbin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704171004576148974172060658.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
but it illustrates what computers can do in terms of artificial intelligence. certainly it took a gigantic amount of research money and an equally large amount of computing power to achieve such a result but there can be no doubt that it is possible for computers do outperform the very best humans in areas that require established knowledge rather than 'original' thinking.
As you may know Exetel has been looking at ways to use AI to improve our support facilities for well over five years now. We have made very little progress using our own resources and some two years ago we provided funding to SLIT in Colombo to provide the personnel via an assistant professorship to progress this investigation more sensibly. Obviously a company of Exetel's size cannot begin to make the financial and other commitments a gigantic company like IBM can - and we obviously had no such ambitions.
However the project we are funding is making some practical progress and we expect to begin testing the first phase later this month. Our goal was/is to remove the 'drudgery' from support people's job by providing a machine to answer the many repetitive questions they get asked each day and thereby remove the boredom that induces and therefore make the job more enjoyable and also much more rewarding. How many times would anyone like to answer questions like "where do I find the user facilities" or "where do I find my invoice" or endless similar questions before hurling their computer across the room?
It is going to be a very long time before we get something sensible put in place (five plus years and counting to date) but the 'Watson' results confirm that it's more than possible. I saw the current progress that had been made while I was in Colombo in January this year and was impressed that what I saw was so much better than where our own efforts had reached when we handed over the project to people infinitely more skilled and knowledgeable than we were. I think that it will be able to provide sensible answers over the remainder of this year and I will be interested in how much progress will be made over that time.
As part of our tiny commitment to making life more rewarding for the millions of employees in call centres around the world we committed to making any code developed 'open source' and, for whatever that becomes worth, we will also make our q and a data base for the 'engine' available as 'open source'. Perhaps, if there is any general value in the work being undertaken, other similar companies will contribute to developing the data base and we will benefit from there efforts.
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