Online conversational support – chat – is the fastest-growing customer service channel, being the preferred way for millennials to obtain customer service. Today, supporting international customers in this channel is mostly done using human agents that speak different languages – a scarce and costly resource.
The project MAIA will develop a multilingual conversational platform, supported by machine translation and dialogue systems, where AI agents assist human agents. This approach will overcome the limitations of existing customer service.
Keywords: AI . Machine Translation . Conversational support
MAIA project will focus on improving chats [message applications] to develop multilingual conversations by expanding customer service professionals’ skills, using artificial intelligence, and making this support process more efficient. To do so, the MAIA consortium will develop a set of machine learning technologies that will allow automatic translation and responses. Among the main challenges is the need to consider the conversational context to ensure accurate, correct, and culturally appropriate translations
The ultimate goal of MAIA will be to develop multilingual chats using AI, allowing companies to chat with their customers in 30 different languages
Promoter:
UNBABEL– João Graça and Paulo Dimas
Academic Co-promoters:
Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) – André Martins
INESC-ID – Helena Moniz
CMU:
Language Technologies Institute – Graham Neubig
MAIA will target the following scientific and technological goals:
Two demonstrators will be built to cover concrete use cases in the Travel and Tourism Industries.
