Can Digital Humans Democratise Personalised Service?
Digital Humans are AI powered virtual beings that recreate natural human interaction at scale. Kia Mia meets customers as they walk into the Kia Motors showroom in Denmark, she interacts and engages with them. But she happens to be a digital human, an avataar that exists behind a lifesize screen, and has a camera that […]
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Digital Humans are AI powered virtual beings that recreate natural human interaction at scale.
Kia Mia meets customers as they walk into the Kia Motors showroom in Denmark, she interacts and engages with them. But she happens to be a digital human, an avataar that exists behind a lifesize screen, and has a camera that works as her eyes. With this camera, she is able to wake, interact with customers, record and react to them based on their words, facial expressions and gesticulations. Kia Mia is trained using machine learning on millions of images of humans expressing different emotions. Her job is to aid sales teams with customer interaction without losing out on the human value of communication. And so, she knows when to smile back. In fact, the more she interacts with people, the smarter she gets.
But there is a lot going on behind that friendly face. There are four layers working behind the scenes; the chatbot layer enables the conversation, the text of the chatbot is converted into speech, in a voice and accent that suits the situation, the customer’s spoken question is converted back into text for the chatbot to process and a visual layer reflects the actual Digital Human and his or her background. Between the chatbot and the visual layer, emotional presence and facial expressions are programmed, to reflect at the right point in the response.
Between the chatbot and the visual layer, emotional presence and facial expressions are programmed, to reflect at the right point in the response.
Kia Mia is the brainchild of NTT DATA, an IT business service based in Tokyo. For the digital human to be responsive, it uses Quantum Capture and Qlik technologies for visuals, SAP’s conversational AI to comprehend, and SAP HANA and IBM’s Watson to think and remember.
Personalisation at scale
Digital humans may soon become as commonplace as chatbots when it comes to answering customer queries. Two in three (66 per cent) companies now compete on experience alone. These companies outperform competitors by 80 per cent. As the focus turns towards offering personalised experiences at scale, it becomes more important for companies to be able to cope with the large number of queries through automation but not at the cost of what people value most – natural human interactions. Empathy takes on a whole new dimension when digital humans find purpose in the healthcare or insurance industry where customers find themselves seeking product information and guidance while dealing with an emotionally-charged situation. Digital humans therefore come trained with emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence. As brands evolve to find their place in the metaverse, a digital human workforce will soon become a norm.
Soul Machine’s digital human Yumi works with a Japanese skincare brand to speak with potential customers about their skincare concerns and help them find the right product for their unique needs. As a retail use case, this digital human also boasts of a Net Promoter Score of 90 per cent. The company presents specific avataars for use cases across healthcare, real estate, tech and media. The fact that their digital humans can communicate in 12 different languages and multiple dialects is a bonus. Soul Machine’s creations are powered by IBM Watson and we use Watson Assistant, and clients include Autodesk, Daimler-Benz Financial Services and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Human or human-like
Deloitte works with UneeQ, a digital human platform, to create and train these virtual employees to imbibe the culture of the organisation and form a good fit for the customer’s requirement. But UneeQ doesn’t just create a virtual workforce but also recreates real business leaders in virtual avataars. As in the case with UBS in Switzerland, where UneeQ designed and developed a digital human double of UBS Chief Economist Daniel Kalt so he could be two places at once, literally. The digital avatar of Daniel Kalt is able to draw on a deep trove of UBS’s financial forecast data and present insights to high-wealth clients “face to face”, and he never gets tired.
The most famous avatar is Digital Einstein who can be adopted by organisations for trainings or find a use case in the educational sector. Users can ask Einstein anything about his life and work.
Inteso is the brainchild of a partnership between Consegna and UneeQ, powered by AWS. Created in the AWS cloud, Inteso uses advanced artificial intelligence services such as Amazon Lex and Polly to enable natural language conversations and understanding across a variety of languages and voice personas.
By 2030, Emergen Research estimates that the digital human market will be worth $527.58 billion, growing 46.4 per cent (CAGR) in the years leading up to that. The impact of digital humans is sure to be massive in fields such as healthcare, where it serves to ease the resource crunch and offer a human-like experience without the judgement of actual humans. Digital humans promise to provide only the good bits. But retail and banking sectors have first dibs since other industries are slower to adapt. Brands have an opportunity to develop their digital humans not just as an extra pair of hands to tackle large volumes of customer service tickets but to add a personalised touch to every brand interaction. Digital humans can integrate with data systems such as CRMs so brands can deliver a unique experience to customers informed by their history, profiles and inclinations.
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