AI in Customer Care, Creative Writing, and China
One question weget a lot is “what do you do, day to day?” Fair question, as this news briefing is simply a by-product of my team’s work. One part is: “commercialising cutting edge NLP research”, mostly focused on our own SaaS product, the Knowledge Network. Try it out here. Also, here’s a sneak peek of a recent project I’ve been running.
Three themes this week: China, creative writing, and customer care.
Investment in AI continues at a huge scale, and no less in China. As recent news highlighted (see The China Internet Report), China’s investment in AI continues to grow at a huge scale and is now well-past the “copycat” China of 10 years ago: China in fact is now itself being copied. This week in the Natural Language Processing space, iFLYTEK was granted what is, to Western ears, a crazy amount of money from the Chinese government. To understand a little more about how this works, you can listen to Kai-Fu Lee’s interview with Lex Fridman at MIT. We were lucky enough to have Wuxu Zhang, GM of International Development speak at CogX this year.
The question of AI creativity continues to swirl around. Make no mistake: robots in our day to day lives are a ways off and jobs that supplant human manual labour are far off into the future (this is somewhat echoed by Kai-Fu Lee in the podcast above). However, if your job is taking some existing digital thing and making small changes to it, then this is something where there is extremely rapid innovation under way. We have three articles this week on the impact of AI on content creation, including editorial and marketing.
Finally, much closer to home and hopefully something every reader can benefit from: new business success stories for how to deploy great customer care capabilities using Natural Language Processing. The problem NLP-based solutions are solving well is when you’re scaling your business, and you have areas of engagement that are common and stable. We have a couple of great case studies from different parts of the world on that this week too.
Customer Care
How Haptik drives customer success: A case study
Check out this great case study, which will give you insight into how top Indian Haptik chatbot developer (exited recently for $100m) drives customer success with their Lead Generation bot.
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The ultimate guide to excellent customer service
HelpCrunch has put out a great guide on why customer service is so important and how to do it right with conversational AI.
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Creative Writing
The Journalism AI global survey
The London School of Economics have surveyed the AI landscape in journalism. Check out their findings here.
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AI and the future of copywriting, in conversation with eBay’s Molly Prosser
Phrasee CEO and Co-founder Parry Malm recently sat down with eBay’s Associate Creative Director Molly Prosser to discuss what she’s learned about the evolving relationship between human copywriters and AI-powered short-form marketing language.
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Will AI replace journalists?
The Observer has put out a great piece which highlights the many uses of AI in journalism, with a focus on the ethical implications of the technology.
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Coaching
Would you let a chatbot coach you?
Technology is taking over one of HR’s most intrinsically human tasks — but some are concerned it’s little more than a gimmick.
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China
China’s voice recognition champion iFlytek gets US$407M
The Shenzhen-listed company will use the proceeds to bankroll research in open platforms for smart speech, so-called next generation cognitive technology, and service robots, it said in a stock exchange filing last week.
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China’s internet giants fight for dominance in smart speakers
Among dozens of smart speaker vendors that have emerged in China, Baidu currently leads the pack with 3.3 million units shipped in the first quarter.
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