Accenture AI Consulting by Amelia and IPsoft

Interesting that Accenture openly uses the term AI.

Amelia Practice to Help Organizations Accelerate Adoption of Artificial Intelligence

Accenture and IPsoft Launch Accenture Amelia Practice to Help Organizations Accelerate Adoption of Artificial Intelligence

Initial practice focus is to deploy virtual agent technology for clients in banking, insurance and travel industries

NEW YORK; May 16, 2016 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and IPsoft today announced the creation of an Accenture Amelia practice, designed to accelerate client adoption of artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes and create new growth opportunities for their businesses. Accenture will utilize IPsoft’s Amelia platform to develop go-to-market strategies, solutions and consulting service offerings around deployments of virtual agent technology for clients across several industries with initial focus on banking, insurance and travel.  .... " 

Video

More Assistants: IPSoft, Amelia and AI

Chetan Dube - CEO and president, IPsoft
" ... For Chetan Dube, the dream of true artificial intelligence—a machine or program that does not simply regurgitate data but can instead interpret the myriad nuances of human speech and logic and respond in kind in real time—has been more of a false promise than a reality. Dube and his colleagues at IPsoft intend to change that with what they have dubbed the first “cognitive agent.” The platform’s name is Amelia and, according to Dube, she (the feminine pronoun is constantly invoked) represents a huge step toward a program that does not merely mimic human intelligence, but interprets a speaker’s intent and then solves problems much like a human assistant might—only much, much faster. ... " 

IPsoft and Amelia

More Assistant Discussion at the CSIG Linkedin site

Amelia Thinks like You

Emergence of more companies in the conversational advisory space.  IPsoft gets publicity in the WSJ today with their cognitive offering:  Amelia, a Machine, Thinks Like You ... She Can Solve Problems if Answer Is in Data She Gets....  With some interesting comparisions to Watson.  Includes a transcript of a conversation with Amelia.

"  .... incubated for the past decade at a privately owned, relatively obscure IT services firm called IPSoft—is different. She learns from textbooks, transcriptions of conversations, email chains and just about any other text. As long as the answer appears in the data she gets, she can solve problems.

IPSoft's main product is another bit of artificial intelligence, a software suite known for automatically resolving IT infrastructure issues known as IPcenter. A Gartner analyst wrote that IPSoft is a "stealthy newcomer," competing with the likes of IBM. IPSoft was founded in 1998 and has offices in nine countries ... "

More Digital Humans Emerging

Recall Microsoft's patent of a particular person, just mentioned here.   Recall too the 'uncanny valley', and other disturbing side-effects.   And the magic can collapse quickly of the conversation is not convincing.   But I expect this kind of play being quite common in not too many years.    I have mentioned our own primitive attempts here to simulate conversational brand equity.    Learned much before the capabilities were ready.

Home/News/'Are You Real?'

'Are You Real?'   By Gregory Goth, Commissioned by CACM Staff, January 26, 2021

A Digital Employee developed by IPoft company Amelia.

The digital human is a chatbot partnered with a lifelike avatar to add a visually relatable element to interactions.

Tyler Beck, chief operating officer of Dothan, Ala.-based Five Star Credit Union, recently began evaluating artificial intelligence-based technologies for the $500-million institution serving portions of Alabama and Georgia. As his research progressed, he said he was contacted by a vendor's representative via LinkedIn.

"When I finally got to talk to the company, the lady wasn't on the call," Beck said, "and it hit me she wasn't real. She was artificial intelligence. And not only was the interaction I had with her powered through AI, her profile picture was created through AI. That did a lot to tell me it was on a whole different level than I realized it was at. The functionality and use cases for AI, especially in financial services, is going to be great."

Among the latest iterations of AI-based platforms is the "digital human," a chatbot partnered with a lifelike avatar intended to add a visually relatable element to an interaction. Though Beck and many other business executives are not quite ready to pull the trigger on installing virtual tellers or advisors quite yet, several vendors are quickly emerging. The ecosystem that will enable their technologies to assume prominence is still in its infancy, but is growing quickly.

Additionally, vendors are branding their products to be readily identified as more than disembodied chatbots. New York-based Amelia (formerly known as IPSoft), for example, has trademarked the phrase Digital Employee for its platform, while Austin, Texas-based UneeQ's World Wide Web domain name is digitalhumans.com.

"We are fairly bullish on it," said Jim Lundy, founder and CEO of technology consultancy Aragon Research. "We've seen them in action. We are still in the very early innings and I say that because a lot of the bots that have been deployed thus far are terrible, but for every nine that are bad or average, there is usually one that is amazing."   ... " 

Amelia Virtual Assistant. Understanding Risk

Amelia. The Virtual Assistant that May Take Your Job
Continued emergence of virtual assistants with new capabilities: How will these be integrated into the workplace?    I have been receiving more interest recently in understanding this.   A key aspect will be for companies to understand the capabilities and risks involved.    Expect to see continued parallel testing.

Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber

Spent quite some time in the enterprise considering extreme events.  Interesting to see Uber's way to address this. With some technical details.   In DSC, posted by Amelia Matteson:

Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber - with Recurrent Neural Networks    This article is by Nikolay Laptev, Slawek Smyl, and Santhosh Shanmugam.

At Uber, event forecasting enables us to future-proof our services based on anticipated user demand. The goal is to accurately predict where, when, and how many ride requests Uber will receive at any given time.

Extreme events—peak travel times such as holidays, concerts, inclement weather, and sporting events—only heighten the importance of forecasting for operations planning. Calculating demand time series forecasting during extreme events is a critical component of anomaly detection, optimal resource allocation, and budgeting.

Although extreme event forecasting is a crucial piece of Uber operations, data sparsity makes accurate prediction challenging. Consider New Year’s Eve (NYE), one of the busiest dates for Uber. We only have a handful of NYEs to work with, and each instance might have a different cohort of users. In addition to historical data, extreme event prediction also depends on numerous external factors, including weather, population growth, and marketing changes such as driver incentives.

A combination of classical time series models, such as those found in the standard R forecast package, and machine learning methods are often used to forecast special events. These approaches, however, are neither flexible nor scalable enough for Uber.

In this article, we introduce an Uber forecasting model that combines historical data and external factors to more precisely predict extreme events, highlighting its new architecture and how it compares to our previous model. .... " 

Intelligent Personal Assistants

At today's CSIG meeting Jim Spohrer pointed us to the growth of the intelligent personal assistant,  aka VDA,  and that the Wikipedia article on the topic had a good list and links to work under underway.   The article contains much more.   The idea continues to grow.   Items marked with a * have been covered here.  Here is the list:

(This post is NOW continually updated with new links, hundreds of posts)

*Accenture's MyWizard'
*Accenture's Amelia
*Alibaba Tmall Genie
*Alibaba using AliGenie 
Braina
*Microsoft's 'Cortana'
*Microsoft's 'Invoke'  With Harman-Kardon Using Cortana
*Microsoft Home Hub
*Enterra Aila
*Amazon Echo
*Amazon Show   Amazon Echo with screen
*Google's 'Google Now'
HTC's 'Hidi'
Maluuba Inc's 'Maluuba'
*Cognitive Code's 'SILVIA'
*Cisco's Spark Conferencing Assistant
*Apple's 'Siri'
*Apple's HomePod
*IBM Watson Analytics
*IBM Watson Assistant
*Wolfram Finance
*Wolfram Alpha
Nuance's 'Vlingo'
*Samsung's 'S Voice'
*Samsung's Otto
*Samsung's Bixby  (S8 Phone Assistant)
*BlackBerry's 'BlackBerry Assistant'
*LG's 'Voice Mate'
*LG's Hub Robot
*Baidu's Duer.
*Baidu's Little Fish
*Pepper Retail Robot by Softbank
* Facebook M
*Mattel Aristotle by Nabi  (Baby Monitor)
*Jill Watson  - TA at Ga Tech
*Mycroft
*Kasisto Financial Assistant
*Kuri by Bosch
*Ginger by Intel  (unknown since its acquisition)
*Otto by Samsung
*Viv by Viv Labs
*Google Home   by Google
*Google Assistant by Google
*DingDong by LingLong
*Einstein by Salesforce (links to current collaboration with Oracle?)
*Project Evo by Microsoft
*Connie by Hilton/IBM
*Smart Assistant by Lenovo
*SoundHound for Hyundai
*Essential Home


See also Virtual Personal Assistants.  In Wikipedia.

Lost as Hypertext Storytelling

I was involved in the early use of hypertext as a means of storing and retrieving knowledge. A number of hypertext systems existed before the Web. We constructed systems that used blocks of text that integrated different kinds of knowledge, which then could be linked to broader data that existed in the enterprise.

Here Amelia Beamer sees the TV series 'Lost' as hypertext storytelling.

Decision Trees in Practice

They can also work because they are transparent.     But that transparency can also show when they are difficult to use operationally.   Which can be a good thing.

Why do Decision Trees Work?   in DSC
Posted by Amelia Matteson 

This article is from Win-Vector LLC: 

In this article we will discuss the machine learning method called “decision trees”, moving quickly over the usual “how decision trees work” and spending time on “why decision trees work.” We will write from a computational learning theory perspective, and hope this helps make both decision trees and computational learning theory more comprehensible. The goal of this article is to set up terminology so we can state in one or two sentences why decision trees tend to work well in practice.  .... " 

More Fast Food Robotics

Have seen several food oriented robotics demonstrations lately. 

Why Restaurant Chains Are Investing in Robots and What It Means for Workers

CNBC, Amelia Lucas, December 27, 2022

This year brought a flurry of automation announcements in the restaurant industry, as it copes with staff shortages and higher labor costs. Automation solution providers say that robots are more consistent than overworked employees, and that artificial intelligence can improve the drive-thru process. Experts, however, say it will be years before robots pay off for companies or take the place of workers. More than a year and a half ago, McDonald's began testing software that could take drive-thru orders. At about two dozen test restaurants, the voice-ordering software had an accuracy in the low 80% range, well below the target of 95%. ... '