Beyond Q&A – AI for Intelligent Assistants

By Derek Top on December 10, 2015

Automated customer service in the form virtual agents and web-based intelligent assistants are clearly serving the needs of customers today.

At the recent Intelligent Assistants Conference NYC 2015, Allen Sebrell, director of eCommerce and business programs at Amtrak, outlined how his firm’s online intelligent assistant “Ask Julie” (provided by Next IT) directly answers more than 20,000 questions per day among the 200,000 visitors to the website.

While this scale of automated customer service is indeed impressive, the role of “artificial intelligence for customer service” promises to go beyond current state-of-the-art intelligent assistants deployments and usher in a new level of sophisticated, highly accurate customer interactions. This was a topic of a panel discusssion, “Beyond Q&A – AI for Intelligent Assistants”, held at IAC NYC 2015 that included Amtrak as well as Timothy Tuttle, PhD, CEO & founder of MindMeld, and Andy Mauro, Senior Director, Cognitive Innovations Group, Nuance Communications.

Here’s the session in its entirety from Intelligent Assistants Conference 2015: