Smart Virtual Agent Accelerated With Transfer Learning For Customer Service (ART/342CP) | ASTRI - Hong Kong Applied Science And Technology Research Institute Company Limited

Project Title:

Smart Virtual Agent accelerated with Transfer Learning for Customer Service (ART/342CP)

Project Reference:

ART/342CP

Project Type:

Platform

Project Period:

28 / 03 / 2022 - 27 / 09 / 2023

Funds Approved (HK$’000):

7,851.625

Project Coordinator:

Ms Adele WANG

Deputy Project Coordinator:

Deliverable:

Research Group:

Sponsor:

AAHAA LIMITED (Contract Service)
SINO ESTATES MANAGEMENT LIMITED (Contract Service)

Description:

Artificial intelligence (AI), through voice dialogue to communicate with people, can turn some manual services into robotic services, such as telephone inquiry and business processing, the current AI services have some shortcomings and capabilities to be improved and enhanced. When artificial intelligence answers calls, the multilingual scenario is a tough situation that AI platform is usually facing in the service. Language recognition and semantic understanding of multi-language is an important part of the research of this project. Moreover, in this project, we will build the vertical domain knowledge for different industries, the application specific knowledge will be added into the domain knowledge so that the AI agent can understand the context of conversation during the call. How to generate an answer is another important technique after understanding the input language and its semantics. In addition, we will study the algorithm of voice cloning over text-to-speech engine and generation of virtual character, such that virtual AI agent can give human-like feedback with facial expression with specific voiceprint. These studies will enable us to build a full stack intelligent AI platform for smart AI customer services.

Co-Applicant:

Keywords:

More about ASTRI

Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) was founded by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2000 with the mission of enhancing Hong Kong’s competitiveness through applied research. ASTRI’s core R&D competence in various areas is grouped under five Technology Divisions: Advanced Electronic Components and Systems; Artificial Intelligence and Trust Technologies; Communications Technologies; Innovative Mind; and IoT Sensing and AI Technologies. It is applied across six core areas which are Smart City, Financial Technologies, New Industrialisation and Intelligent Manufacturing, Digital Health, Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Metaverse.

Over the years, ASTRI has nurtured a pool of research, I&T talents and received numerous international awards for its pioneering innovations as well as outstanding business and community contributions. As of 2023/24, ASTRI has transferred more than 1,500 technologies to the industry and has been granted over 1,100 patents in the Mainland, the US, and other countries.

As a Hong Kong R&D centre, one of ASTRI’s important goals is to help customers harness business opportunities from the thriving technology market and increase their competitive strengths. Customers and partners can improve their efficacy by drawing on ASTRI’s expertise and research achievements.