Xiaoi robot: service is king

At the beginning of this year, as the Hong Kong subsidiary of Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology Co., Ltd. listed on the New Third Board, Hong Kong Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established. Zhu Pinpin, President and CTO of Zhizhen Intelligence, revealed in an exclusive interview with "CEConline" that the company's business in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other regions has already been launched, and the establishment of the Hong Kong subsidiary is to better serve Bank of China (Hong Kong) and Hong Kong Telecom , Hanson Robotics, Chengxi Information, Foxconn and other partners or customers, and further develop the Asia-Pacific market and the international market.

The popularity of Zhizhen Intelligence is far less than that of its virtual robot "Little i". Today, Xiaoi has more than 500 million users in more than 100 countries and regions. Every year, it applies for more than 100 intellectual property rights at home and abroad. Its service fields include communications, finance, e-government, e-commerce, smart home appliances, and automobile transportation. an industry. As for the patent entanglement between Xiaoi and the technology giant Apple Siri, although the outcome of the lawsuit is uncertain, the grievances and grievances in it have also brought Xiaoi, who has been working silently in the B2B field for many years, to the forefront.

Transformation from B2C to B2B

The growth process of Xiaoi Robot reflects the twists and hardships of Chinese local companies chasing the dream of artificial intelligence. When Zhu Pinpin was graduating from a doctorate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he met Yuan Hui, who had just left Microsoft. One of them had technical advantages, careful thinking and clear logic, and the other was good at marketing and had a common concept of mobile Internet. The best partner for entrepreneurship. During the SARS period in 2003, many people were unable to go out because they were chased and blocked by the aunts of the neighborhood committee. Zhu Pinpin made a smart robot online chat product called "Xiao i", which became popular all of a sudden. Obtained the opportunity to cooperate with Tencent QQ and the first venture capital investment. From 2004 to 2009, Xiaoi experienced a roller coaster-like development. The number of employees dropped sharply from more than 200 to 40 or 50. In desperation, Zhu Pinpin and Yuan Hui even went to borrow "usury loans" to alleviate the crisis.

The common application of artificial intelligence virtual assistant is actually divided into two directions: VPA and VCA, the former is a virtual personal assistant, such as Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, etc. belong to this category; and VCA is Virtual Customer Assistant. The "burning money" model for the consumer side is a bottomless pit. Benefiting from the great business opportunities of the domestic government and large enterprises for the surge in demand for online customer service, Xiaoi has successfully transformed into a B2B model through the online customer service robot system to help the government and enterprises improve work efficiency, replacing pre-sales and after-sales customer service personnel.

In September 2006, Zhizhen Intelligent Company developed China's first intelligent customer service robot "Mr. Hyde" for the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission. The intelligent virtual customer assistant has greatly solved the bottleneck of customer service. It saves human resources and improves the efficiency and quality of customer service.

In 2008, the intelligent customer service robot developed by the company for Jiangsu Mobile was launched, which opened the application of virtual customer service robot in the field of operators. Subsequently, major customers such as Bank of Communications, JD.com, Hubei Telecom, SF Express, and Lenovo came one after another, which not only solved the problem of the survival and development of Zhizhen Intelligence, but also allowed Xiaoi's industry knowledge base to be continuously expanded and optimized. At present, most of the three major domestic telecom operators and dozens of top-ranked banks in the country have become Xiaoi customers, and there are more than 200 corporate and government partners. "The rapid expansion of our business is related to the status of customer service in the Chinese market. The introduction of telephone customer service in China is too short, and it has quickly crossed this level. The rapid development of mobile Internet has provided a good soil for Internet customer service." Zhu Pinpin said .

Customer service center turned into contact center

Artificial intelligence does not replace but frees people. For enterprises, the change brought by Xiaoi is not only the reduction of labor costs, but also the service Changes in consciousness. Talking about the company won the "2015-2016 Best Smart Service Provider for Contact Center in China" not long ago, Zhu Pinpin suggested that the concept of "Contact Center" should be vigorously promoted.

In the past, many companies believed that the role of the customer service center was a channel for after-sales communication between companies and customers, and its function was more to help find solutions when there was a problem with a product or service, so as to improve customer satisfaction. Therefore, most companies regard the customer service center as a cost center, and they often try to reduce the cost by reducing the length of the call during assessment, hoping to send the call customers away as soon as possible.

Customer service and support departments are often hit by the fact that businesses don't realize the importance of key customer information collected by call centers; meanwhile, marketing departments continue to ask service departments to collect specific information for them. Disappointed by the charges related to the collection of data raised by the customer service department. Zhu Pinpin believes that behind the change in the title from "customer service center" to "contact center" is the change of corporate mission and culture. Nowadays, more and more companies have realized the importance of contacting customers before sales. Strengthening customer experience management has greatly changed the mission of the contact center. They have gradually become an important channel for contacting customers, allowing customers to better understand products and services. . Many marketing activities are done through this center, making it from a cost department to a profit department.

With the help of Xiaoi, China Mobile Communications Group Guangdong Co., Ltd. has made many attempts, and its call center has become increasingly intelligent. At present, it has three capabilities: first, intelligent wiring, which can Solve routine service problems; secondly, provide intelligent support to the agent's workbench, including phone identification, identity identification and knowledge base search; in addition, through machine learning, it can integrate data such as customers' usage habits and purchase records, and recommend suitable customers. products or services.

"Artificial intelligence technology and virtual robots will bring revolutionary changes to the customer service industry." Zhu Pinpin said, "For example, after a bank adopts our VCA, if it completes 2 million interactions every day , we can save 6,000 human customer service personnel. Calculated at 100,000 per person per year, we can save 600 million yuan a year for this bank."

General Manager of China Merchants Bank Credit Card Center Liu Jialong commented: "Little The intelligent interaction capability provided by i has brought about a qualitative change in the services of China Merchants Bank, prompting the transformation of China Merchants Bank's services from traditional to intelligent." With the further awakening of the market, Zhu Pinpin expects that the company's business will emerge in the next three to five years. Jump growth.

Artificial intelligence is long and difficult

Last year, Microsoft launched a Twitter online chatbot called "Tay", but only 16 hours after it went online, it had to It was urgently taken offline because Tay began to swear, saying some racist, insulting women and filthy words.

Dr. Bart Selman, an artificial intelligence expert and a professor of computer science at Cornell University in the United States, believes that the incident with Microsoft Tay highlights that artificial intelligence's understanding of semantics is better than that of the human brain. It's still a long way off, but Zhu Pinpin doesn't agree with this point of view. He said: "Tay's problem should be in the logic of the software. As early as 2004, our little i encountered the same problem. The source of the robot's intelligence comes from big data, it does not create itself. Many The quality of netizens is not high, they often use some vulgar sentences, and the answers of robots are often learned from vocabulary that is used more in the Internet. In addition, language is not the core ability of human beings, and the accumulation of knowledge is more important for robots , improve cognitive ability.”

Globally, virtual robots are still in their infancy. Including Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, several major American technology giants have begun to compete secretly in intelligent chatbots. Compared with these intelligent robots, Xiaoi robot has better semantic understanding of Chinese, and has obvious advantages in context and knowledge reasoning. Zhu Pinpin pointed out that in terms of industrial application, several giants in the United States focus on platform development and strive to build an ecosystem on the Internet of Things. The knowledge base and semantic database of the industry domain owned by Xiaoi are a rare wealth.

For many consecutive years, the well-known consulting firm Gartner has recommended the Xiaoi robot to the world many times in its annual global summits and reports. In the above, Xiaoi, together with Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Amazon Echo, are considered to be the most typical dialogue systems in the world, providing intelligent interaction capabilities in the cloud.

Some people say that the difference between Chinese and American technology companies in the application of artificial intelligence is that when the technology is equally advanced, Chinese companies pay more attention to promoting user experience and business prosperity through artificial intelligence technology, and making it as possible as possible. business; and American companies have "played" to the extreme in a seemingly useless field. Zhu Pinpin's response to this point of view is that from the perspective of company operation, the landing is very important. In fact, many American companies also do this technology industrialization, but their innovation environment is more superior, with the support of capital, so that playing companies also have the opportunity to innovate. companies have more room for growth.

The core technology of Xiaoi is semantic understanding and intelligent interaction. It is driven by knowledge base and semantic base, and uses a machine learning system to continuously acquire knowledge from big data. Zhu Pinpin, who was born in R&D, believes that R&D is to remove various obstacles and connect technology with projects. The post-80s generation is the main force in Xiaoi Robot's engineering research and development team, while the core algorithm team is mainly post-70s returnees. They understand the world's most advanced architecture and systems, and new technologies and new algorithms are published in English. The company's R&D investment is mainly in two aspects: one is the investment in forward-looking technology, and the second is the investment in the product and business level. Forward-looking accounts for about one-third, and two-thirds are in product solutions.

Service is the core

The latest report of iiMedia Research shows that by the end of 2016, the size of the mobile customer service market reached 2.89 billion yuan, and the size of the entire customer service market in China exceeded 1,000. billion. With the development of big data, cloud computing and integrated circuit technology, the era of artificial intelligence customer service has arrived.

"The core development of robots lies in service." Zhu Pinpin pointed out that Xiaoi robot has been upgraded from the stage of simply providing products and applications to the stage of being a more core platform and architecture capability exporter in the intelligent robot industry. Provide cloud-based intelligent interaction capabilities. In addition to providing enterprise-level dialogue robots and intelligent knowledge bases in related fields for large customers such as banks and governments, Xiaoi Robot also provides a cloud platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises and developers quickly create application robots, provide standardization and cloud service-related , and released the iBot OS system for intelligent hardware and intelligent robots. With the system, some companies that do not have the ability to develop an intelligent dialogue system but have corresponding needs can directly access it to improve the performance of their own products.

However, the ideal is very plump, but the reality is very skinny. Zhu Pinpin said: "We are also working hard to tap the market of domestic small and medium-sized enterprises, but just like cloud services, they are used to using free resources, and business promotion in this regard is difficult."

Commercial Application and Business Integration Conference Accelerate the development of intelligent robots. In the domestic market, the development of intelligent robots in some fields is no worse than that of foreign countries, but it has not yet been popularized, and artificial intelligence technology needs to be commercialized. "In the next step, Xiaoi robot should deepen the industry and create more value for customers." Zhu Pinpin said, "In line with the globalization process of Chinese enterprises, Xiaoi will strive to develop into multiple languages and provide services in traditional Chinese and English. .”

My Dream of Made in China

CEConline: How do you see the future of China’s manufacturing industry?

Zhu Pinpin: Opportunities and challenges coexist. In front of it, we have to catch up with advanced countries such as Germany. The existing industrial manufacturing level and technology are relatively weak, but the Internet and artificial intelligence technology are at least not lagging behind, and even have leading advantages in some parts; we will face the catch-up of emerging countries represented by Southeast Asia. , there is no cost advantage, and the distance is not so great. The direction is very clear, the key lies in action! How to play the market dynamics of enterprises is very important.

CEConline: Could you please predict what the little i robot will be like in 10 years?

Zhu Pinpin: In such an era of rapid change, 10 years is too long to say predictions, only hope and goals: 10 years later, artificial intelligence will be everywhere, and the Xiaoi robot will become the new " BAT".

CEConline: What will your personal life and work situation be like 10 years from now?

Zhu Pinpin: If you have money and time, let the robot serve you and enjoy the fun of "programming" and "innovation".

Picture/ Zhizhen Smart