Amelia is the AI computing system with an eye on your job

It’s an old debate, but it’s always fascinating and, at times, even scary. Will technology some day make human beings obsolete? It is perhaps an easy question to answer if one is looking at the heavy machinery industry. It is indeed easy to see why machinery would hoist the roof of a high storey building instead of hundred men doing it. But what about other tasks? Enter ‘Amelia’, a new artificial intelligence computing system unveiled today which aims replace the human at work by performing the most basic tasks.

Her name derived from the American aviator and pioneer Amelia Earhart, Amelia is not the first computing system built to obliterate humans, or at least prove that the human race is incompetent.

In 2011, IBM Watson, an artificial intelligent computer system, astonished audiences worldwide by beating the two all-time greatest Jeopardy champions. But it was soon forgotten about, at least by the mainstream media.

Chetan Dube, the chief executive Officer of IPsoft, the company behind Amelia thinks we ought not to sit on our loins and think that Amelia will like Watson fall into forgetfulness.

“Watson is perhaps the best data analytics engine that exists on the planet; it is the best search engine that exists on the planet; but IBM did not set out to create a cognitive agent. It wanted to build a program that would win Jeopardy, and it did that,” said Dube in an interview with UK newspaper The Telegraph.

“Amelia, on the other hand, started out not with the intention of winning Jeopardy, but with the pure intention of answering the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 – can machines think?”

Amelia learns the same written instructions as her human colleagues but the developers claim that she absorbs the information at a fraction of the time it takes a human being. On top of that, not only is she reading but she understands what she is reading.

When exposed to the same information as any new employee in a company, Amelia can quickly grasp it and then apply her knowledge to solve the queries in a wide range of business processes. Further more, Amelia, by observing a colleague work, she can learn from them and continually build her own cognitive understanding.

Amelia speaks more than 20 languages. She interacts like a human being. And to fully grasp a process she needs only to be taught once and she is able to communicate with customers in their language.

“Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. If a system claims to be intelligent, it must be able to read and understand documents, and answer questions on the basis of that. It must be able to understand processes that it observes. It must be able to solve problems based on the knowledge it has acquired. And when it cannot solve a problem, it must be capable of learning the solution through noticing how a human did it,” said Dube.

It has been 15 years since IPsoft began to work on this technology and its aim was for it not only to succeed in imitating human thought processes but go beyond that and comprehend the nuances of what is being said.

IPsoft wants to do something quite remarkable: its ultimate goal for Amelia is for her to infiltrate the working environment to the point that it cannot be imagined without her (in much the same way we can no longer imagine farming without tractors). IPsoft believes that cognitive technologies will drive the next evolution of the global workforce to a point that in future companies will have a mixture of human and virtual employees.

Amelia has been trialled in various work areas from procurement processing, manning technology help desks, financial trading operations support and providing expert advice for field engineers.

In each of these fields, Amelia has learnt to not only read existing manuals and the context behind but also has interacted with human colleagues in the way that a new employee might shadow an old employee.

Having grasped all of this, Amelia can answer phone calls, understand what the caller is looking for, ask questions and access the required information and determine which steps to follow in order to solve the query.

Amelia’s grasp of processes was impressive during this trial period. Within a month she was able to solve 42% of the common queries without assistance and by the second month her percentage went up to 64.

Dube goes on to boast about Amelia.

“That’s a true learning cognitive agent. Learning is the key to the kingdom, because humans learn from experience. A child may need to be told five times before they learn something, but Amelia needs to be told only once,” said Dube.

The next step for IPsoft is embedding Amelia into humanoid robots, allowing her to take advantage of their mechanical functions.

“The robots have got a fair degree of sophistication in all the mechanical functions–– the ability to climb up stairs, the ability to run, the ability to play ping-pong. What they don’t have is the brain, and we’ll be supplementing that brain part with Amelia,” said Dube.

“I am convinced that in the next decade you’ll pass someone in the corridor and not be able to discern if it’s a human or an android.”