Corporate Research & Development Center

Problem-solving dialogue technology for reducing the cost of customer services

2013/04

Overview

Toshiba has developed an advanced spoken dialogue technology for human-machine dialogue system designed to infer the intentions of users' utterances and assist in resolving their problems.

Problem-solving dialogue technology for reducing the cost of customer services

Development background

In many scenes of customer services, call center operators understand customer's problems and needs from their ambiguous speeches and assist in resolving their problems. However, conventional dialogue technologies on smartphones cannot infer the intentions of users' utterances and steer the dialogue toward solving the problem presented by users, when a user speaks to a dialogue system about a problem.

Problem-solving dialogue technology

Toshiba has developed an advanced spoken dialogue technology designed to infer the intentions of users' utterances and assist in resolving their problems based on problem-solving knowledge. We have constructed the problem-solving knowledge -- the pair of reason and solution -- from tens of billion sentences of Web corpus. We extracted forty thousand expressions of user's request and problem from the corpus and made quarter million solutions for their request and problem. When a user speaks to a dialogue system about a problem, the dialogue system can propose averagely five or six solutions for each user's request and assist in resolving their problems..
(Note) Corpus: An amount of text data for language analysis.

Outlook

We are improving the dialogue technology to a practical level and developing the platform as a service (PaaS) for customer service solutions.