RE: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:b...@goertzel.org] Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 3:42 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality, see... http://www.smartaction.com/index.html I'm diggin' it. Telephony and AGI merge. Either telephony was going to come to AGI or AGI was going to come to telephony. At some point they needed to embrace. Picture it as resource sharing. I'm definitely interested in what going on with this... John --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
Ben, Just to say many thanks for keeping us posted! Been keen to know this. And would be good to know more details. This does of course sound like something more down Steve Richfield's street - sub-AGI-assistants- a potentially v. valuable field. But not - after all that standard type of hype, - true AGI. Perhaps it does answer though the question I've long had, of how Peter was able to secure such substantial funding, (AFAIK). You can see how a project like this could more easily attract investors, while blue sky AGI is vastly risky. --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
Ben Goertzel wrote: 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. Have you asked Peter if he would be willing to share a demonstration with us, perhaps at AGI-09? I agree that the marketing rhetoric could be interpreted anywhere from incremental improvement to quantum leap: but my money is on something relatively incremental. Remember: something like OCR, when it was first available, seemed amazing when it could boast a pickup efficiency of 95%. But I have had the unenviable task of proofreading an entire (Welsh) dictionary in which the OCR did 95% of the work and I did the other 5%. It was a nightmare. That last 5% is where all the action is. Richard Loosemore --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
2009/1/12 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality We value your interest in our AGI related service. If you agree that AGI can have useful applications for call centres, press 1 If our AGI repeatedly misinterprets your speech, because it was trained on an Australian accent where all statements actually sound like questions, press 2 If you want to listen to some Dire Straits track which is quite good the first time but becomes increasingly annoying as it is played over and over again for ten minutes, press 3 If you wish to be directly connected to our superintelligence, which often gives a cryptic reply before hanging up, press 4 For all other enquiries, press 5 repeatedly in an infuriated manner. --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
--- On Mon, 1/12/09, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality, see... http://www.smartaction.com/index.html It would be nice to see some transcripts of actual conversation between the system and customers to get some idea of how well the system actually works. You'll notice that the contact for more information is a live human... -- Matt Mahoney, matmaho...@yahoo.com --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
From: Bob Mottram [mailto:fuzz...@gmail.com] 2009/1/12 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality We value your interest in our AGI related service. If you agree that AGI can have useful applications for call centres, press 1 If our AGI repeatedly misinterprets your speech, because it was trained on an Australian accent where all statements actually sound like questions, press 2 If you want to listen to some Dire Straits track which is quite good the first time but becomes increasingly annoying as it is played over and over again for ten minutes, press 3 If you wish to be directly connected to our superintelligence, which often gives a cryptic reply before hanging up, press 4 For all other enquiries, press 5 repeatedly in an infuriated manner. Well when you press 4 to get to the superintelligence it's still some remote person on the other side of the world but this time they're doing text-to-speech that plays a semi-robotic voice, so technically it's still an Artificial General Intelligence HAR HAR HAR just kidding... John --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
If our AGI repeatedly misinterprets your speech, because it was trained on an Australian accent where all statements actually sound like questions, press 2 They use the speech recognition engine from nuance, and as far as I can remember, recognition and support for regional accents is one of their newest features, so this one could actually work ok ;). In fact, I have deep respect for nuance products: just a few days ago I used newer Omnipage and Richard believe me: it really did more than 95% of the work (and was much better than the version I used a few years ago). I heard good things about Dragon as well. Of course this is no AGI, but it is critical for some domains, like IVR or robotics, which in turn might finally create a big market for AGI. Lukasz --- 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=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
