Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing a speech-to-text translation and then doing a natural language processing on it, and then tying that to the learning algorithm. Is that the architecture?

Danny Tomsett: That’s right. The digital human is able to understand through speech-to-text and have an idea of what is going on with the user. We’ll pass through any of the speech-to-text to a natural language processor. We partnered with IBM and work with the IBM Watson technology.

Today we work with many providers. We have already integrated with Microsoft, Google, AWS, and several others. Our technology is agnostic. In this particular instance, we’re connected to IBM Watson for the NLP. 

Sramana Mitra: This use case that you just described of the Australian government, is this something that you’ve repeated elsewhere?

Danny Tomsett: We’ve got over 25 enterprise customers that are using this technology today.

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same use case or just the same technology?

Danny Tomsett: The same technology, but the use case varies. For this one, it’s quite specialized for how they’ve used it. We’ve gone more mainstream to be a little bit more repeatable.

Sramana Mitra: What is the mainstream use case that you are getting traction on?

Danny Tomsett: We have a couple of key areas. A lot of our customers are looking to use the technology to help customers who are looking to understand our product or service really well. We have clients in financial services and retail for customers looking for a mortgage application or they’re looking for a sales concierge or agent. It’s also a fantastic brand ambassador.

What’s common across our customers is understanding this trend. One of the key things that we’re seeing as a trend across society is, digital brand ambassadors and digital influencers are becoming a key part of a strategy to connect better with users and customers.

That’s not foreign from the point of view that we’ve seen flow from Geico and other brands. That’s really been about how brands talk to your customers. With digital humans, it’s all about how a brand talks with your customers. That’s very powerful.

Sramana Mitra: Take me through any of your customers. If I’m a customer of your customer, what would I encounter in this engagement?

Danny Tomsett: One of my favorites that has been with us for a long time now is UBank in Australia. They’re one of the most advanced digital-only banks in the world and are growing at 400% year-on-year. They’re doing phenomenally well.

They created a digital human called Mia. She’s working on a number of different areas now. Initially, she was trained because they noticed that the nature of people looking to apply for mortgages and the mortgage application process had quite a high amount of churn from someone starting the form and not completing.

What they applied Mia to was to be there to really have a customer-friendly engagement. When you think about the last time you had to do the form, this is that experience. 

Sramana Mitra: What does this look like? What format is Mia in? Is Mia a voice? Is Mia a digital avatar?

Danny Tomsett: All our digital humans are like you and I on a video call. They can see you and hear you and are represented both through a visual interaction as well as talk to them and type to them. If you think about Mia, Mia can send emails to you. Mia’s going to have a social channel so people can interact with Mia on social channels. This is becoming a really big business. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ
1 2 3 4 5