Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Izzat Najmi, Journalist, AOPG.

Kun Wu is not a foreign figure in the Artificial Intelligence scene in Southeast Asia. The Co-Founder and Managing Director of AI Rudder, a leading voice AI company based in Singapore is very familiar with AI where he has created and released a number of speech services that utilise Artificial Intelligence and applications. He has worked in the field of Artificial Intelligence and human-computer interfaces for over ten years, specialising in speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing, semantic comprehension, and other related fields.

To learn more about Mr Kun Wu and his quest to improve businesses via AI-driven automation, Disruptive Tech Asia had the pleasure of conducting an interview with him during a recent Fireside Chat event with AI Rudder, Touch n’ Go and Alibaba Cloud.

Mastering Languages

Malaysia and Singapore are one of those countries that use English and their native languages interchangeably (for example Malay and English or Mandarin/Cantonese and English) to converse in their daily lives. There are also plenty of other places where dialects and regional accents play an integral role to people in not only conversing but also in understanding what a person is trying to say.

AI Rudder claims that its voice AI assistants offer the largest language capability in the market with proven mastery in almost all Asian languages that include the likes of Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Filipino, Vietnamese, and regionally accented English throughout the Asian continent. According to Wu, their voice AI is able to correctly capture what people from different areas in the region are conveying by leveraging Machine-Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) capabilities.

In addition, the company intends to incorporate Cantonese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese as well as other widely spoken languages in order to entice a greater number of businesses.

Like Talking to a Friend

Now that they have the language bit sorted out, how about conversations? Will they be as dry as we are talking to an emotionless robot? Kun Wu stated that AI Rudder aims to have conversations between humans and AI bots as life-like as possible, with the ability to anticipate feelings and emotions that customers show.

Voice AI needs to be able to understand and support not only additional languages but also anticipate tones and emotions in order to provide a more natural and engaging user experience.

“It’s more than just reading off a script. For example, AI Rudder’s bots can hold and continue conversations almost like human beings, regardless of interruptions. An essential part of humanising the Voice AI experience is enabling it to understand and support more languages,” stated Wu.

Through the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and lifelike Text-To-Speech (TTS), AI Rudder’s AI Assistant is able to process conversations that it receives, as well as interpret the intent of customers and communicate with a level of intelligence that is close to that of a human. Consumers can speak or ask questions as they normally would, switch between topics or languages and communicate in a very human-like way, just like talking to a friend!

This can ensure that Voice AI can effectively deal with customers in different situations or with different human emotions that in return, can avoid causing frustration and companies losing their customers.

AI Rudder vs Others

AI Rudder’s AI Assistant presently supports scenarios such as KYC (Know-Your-Customer), answering questions, automating reminders such as loan collection, and other forms of customer care support, similar to those supported by other voice AIs now on the market. In addition, the business intends to broaden its scope to include a variety of additional use-cases, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart vehicles that require a new interface, telemarketing, automated lead qualification, appointment confirmation, payment reminder, collecting order feedback and survey data, and possibly adding another language interface for machines to communicate with one another. Coming soon too, AI Rudder plans to update its capabilities to include things like multi-factor authentication and connections to CRM systems.

There has been a rapid sprout of conversational or voice AI start-ups in the current market and more are emerging as each year passes. Hence, organisations want to know, the key details that set AI Rudder apart from other rivals that offer similar solutions.

Kun Wu asserts that AI Rudder’s Automatic Speech Recognition technology is more sophisticated than those of other competitors in the industry and is able to convert speech to text in a manner that is both more accurate and more efficient.

In all honesty, here at DTA we often hear such statements from most of the conversational AI vendors, so without having hands-on experience with these solutions, it’s difficult to verify these claims. Nevertheless, Wu further explained that the AI Rudder bots have the ability to hold and sustain conversations regardless of interruptions, enabling users to feel almost like they’re conversing with real humans.

AI Into the Future

Wu mentioned that AI is the future, and the future is now. Moving forward, Wu is certain that there will be more and more breakthroughs. In terms of voice AI, organisations will measure its performance based on accuracy. Wu gave an instance if, let’s say, we talk to the AI using 1,000 words, how many words can the AI recognise accurately? He stresses that the company will improve accuracy over time by utilising the right data to train the AI model and support many more languages to accommodate the globe’s plethora of lingo.

Voice AI can also be enlarged to a wider range of services which includes the likes of retail, healthcare services, government and some other sectors as well. There are also possibilities to expand voice AI such as the use of voice to start the engine of your vehicle or talk to it to change the temperature inside and even the likes of just talking to an AI system to do errands inside your house.

Ending the interview, Kun Wu said, and I quote, “The future of AI is not just about going vertical but also width when thinking of improving and enhancing such technologies”

(0)(0)