Customer-friendly Dutch chatbots
Ever heard of conversational artificial intelligence (AI)? Anyone who has ever interacted with Siri or Alexa is familiar with this technology. We use conversational AI every day these days and it is becoming increasingly important in service and sales. A consortium of Dutch scientists and companies is receiving 4.6 million euros from NWO to develop Dutch chatbot technology that can be efficiently adapted for specific topics and companies.
Many of the existing conversational AI systems are owned by big tech such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Increasingly, Dutch companies and organizations want to develop more technological independence in the field of customer-focused chatbots. Companies with a large customer base such as Albert Heijn, Bol, Achmea or KPN want to have a wider range of applications and user scenarios at their disposal. In this way, customer service can improve tremendously. Not only in retail, but also in financial services, healthcare and government.
Researchers are going to develop a Dutch chatbot technology
In the project Low-Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence (LESSEN), scientists will develop this Dutch chatbot technology. Although Dutch is a relatively small language in terms of the number of speakers, it is a well-equipped language in terms of the technology and datasets needed to train AI models.
Suzan Verberne: "We are very happy to be working with this top consortium and to bring the scientific developments in the field of chatbot AI to Dutch practice."
However, this is not the case for the wide variety of topics that web stores and other service providers have to deal with. The LESSEN project is developing a practice-based AI technology that is adaptable to the topic and target audience of businesses. This will ultimately allow users to have a better conversation with apps, computers and the services they provide access to.
What exactly does the research involve?
From Leiden University, Suzan Verberne and Jan van Rijn are co-applicants. Verberne will work on adapting conversational models to new topics for which little data is available. Van Rijn will investigate how AI models can be trained as efficiently as possible and, moreover, communicate with customers in real time. Another important goal of the Leiden team is to make the developed technology transparent to customers and to ensure that the personal data of users is handled safely.
Suzan Verberne: "We are very happy to be working with this top consortium and to bring the scientific developments in the field of chatbot AI to Dutch practice."
The consortium consists of: University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Groningen, University of Applied Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, Achmea, Albert Heijn, Bol.com, KPN, Rasa Technologies, Ahold Delhaize, National Police.