Rulai Institute Releases Virtual Assistant Ability Model

CAMPBELL, Calif., Aug. 22, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Rulai inc. a new Conversational Computing Platform provider, today released the Virtual Assistant Ability Model, a framework describing the levels of automation and underlying AI techniques required to deliver increasingly capable virtual assistants.

The framework proposes five levels of automation as a standard by which to measure the ability and intelligence of virtual assistants. It assesses not the product, but the underlying technology to provide a system for objectively classifying virtual assistants.

The five levels are:
Level 1: Human-Agent Assist. This VAs provide answer retrieval services based on specific requests. They are typically deployed as human agent assistants, helping the agent retrieve relevant information quickly. The bot does not directly engage in customer conversations.

Level 2: Partial Automation. Level 2 VAs are capable of managing multi-round conversations along a predefined path. They can predict intent and perform slot filling for specific conversational tasks based on classification and semantic information extraction.

Level 3: Conditional Automation. Level 3 VAs can handle very dynamic conversation flows including mixed initiatives and tasks, multiple intents and seamless escalation. For user requests about trained problems, a level 3 VA can manage most aspects of the user interaction, including when users diverge from the original conversation or request or change their mind.

Level 4: Full Automation in Designed Domain. Level 4 VAs will be able to take complete control of the conversation, even for requests about untrained or unseen questions and tasks. They can plan a conversation to achieve a desired outcome and use complex mathematical and logical reasoning to do so.

Level 5: Human-like Automation. Level 5 VAs are trained to the level of human thinking to perform complex and unstructured tasks that cross domains. A level 5 VA can operate without human input or oversight and perform tasks that even a human has a hard time processing.

"Most virtual assistants in the market operate at level 1 or 2," says Dr. Yi Zhang, Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the lead author of the report, "with level 3 virtual assistants being considered state of the art. Level 4 assistants are still an area of intense academic research, while level 5 remains science fiction for now"

"The Virtual Assistant Ability Model provides a clear framework to think about the current state of conversational AI and where it is headed," says Dr. Jamie Callan, Professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, "It provides a useful guide for companies to assess their investments and priorities in this important segment of AI"

"Chatbots and Virtual Assistants can be deployed for many different use cases but up until now, there hasn't been a good objective way to assess what level of AI is required for each type of use case," says Marc Vanlerberghe, CEO Rulai, "We believe that this framework will help companies better match their operational requirements to the AI technology needed to deliver results."

The detailed report is published by Rulai Institute, the research and education division of Rulai, and is available for download at go.rul.ai/vaam.

About Prof. Yi Zhang
Yi Zhang is a tenured Professor in the School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz and co-founder of Rulai. Her research interests are personalized search and recommendation, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining and computational economics. She has received various awards, including ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, Google Research Award, Microsoft Research Award, and IBM Research Fellowship. She has served as program chair, area chair and PC member for various top tier conferences. She was an associate editor for ACM Transaction on Information Systems. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. from Tsinghua University.
Prof. Zhang has been invited to speak about the Virtual Assistant Ability Model at O'Reilly's AI Conference in San Jose on September 11 as well as Money 20/20 in Las Vegas on October 27-30.

About Rulai
Rulai is a new Enterprise Conversational Computing Platform provider. Rooted in academia, the founding team has a combined 200 years of experience in AI research, published over 400 research papers and filed over 80 patents in advanced AI-based dialog management. It is the only SaaS platform in the market capable of supporting Level 3 Virtual Assistants.
Enterprises in banking, insurance, retail, telco, and life sciences use Rulai to augment the work of customer service agents, as well as increase customer self service capabilities across sales and support. Its easy-to-use platform allows business users to create and evolve virtual assistants with minimal use of precious IT resources. Rulai has been recognized by Gartner, Forrester, and Bloomberg.

About Rulai Institute
Rulai Institute is the research and education division of Rulai Inc. It collaborates with professors from Carnegie Mellon, University of California, Washington University, John Hopkins University and provides research, insights, and educational programs to equip companies with the know-how to automate human-centered business processes using conversational computing. Rulai Institute also offers courses and workshops to help companies implement best practices in conversational computing. Rulai Institute is organizing its next conversational AI design workshop on September 17-18. More details and registration at http://www.rul.ai/institute

SOURCE Rulai