The bot is being built by Touchpoint who have already spent over £230,000 developing it. The Telegraph reports that their creation should be finished by the end of this year in the form of a robot capable of emulating human anger.
It has been created by analysing customer calls to four of Australia’s largest banks during the past two years. The vast amount of data has been filtered into an advanced model which the robot uses to find the best response to a customer complaint.
Digital Trends says that the abusive bot is called Radiant and will be able to swear, call names and hang up in rage once complete, simulating what all too many customers of companies do now. The hope is that it may lead to appeasement of the often angry customer service caller.
Support calls are mostly made by customers already dissatisfied or distressed with their purchases, and a long wait time can cause some of them to snap and tick off. Even with all the advancements made to modern virtual queue management systems, ‘a long wait time’ is still one of the most common complaints that customers make about support lines.
But with the help of the new “angriest AI,” companies may be better positioned to anticipate what a customer is likely to say about the experience. Radiant is intended to be used for training purposes in real call centres but it has been suggested that it could answer calls on its own in the future.
Anger is one of the easiest emotions for a robot to exhibit because of the lack of subtlety. It is always evident when a person is angry, defined by a characteristic behaviour set which can be typified by the millions of insults and verbal retorts that Radiant will learn. It will string the phrases it has learnt from the angry Australian bankers into meaningful sentences and be programmed to repeat these to the trainee call centre worker that will be using it.
With artificial intelligent getting more and more powerful, many have wondered how long it will be before you will be able to have a proper conversation with a robot. Now, Touchpoint is edging ever closer to this future possibility by creating something that cannot only talk but also show emotion — even if it is just the worst that Australia has to offer.
