AI Archives - Verbal Transactions

Dec 09

60 Minutes Just Backed Up Our Core Learning Philosophy

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, AI, bots, call center, contact Center

On Sunday, December 8th, the show 60 Minutes featured a story about how AI was being used in the classroom to help teachers and students learn with the help of AI tutors (via Open AI). The AI is used with the curriculum to help students move through a series of question-and-answer interactions that help them use critical thinking to solve math and science problems. The system developed by Sal Khan, and Open AI, provides a dashboard for the teachers to use to follow the flow of conversations with the student and their AI tutor. The teacher can focus on students’ identified trouble areas vs. trying to spread their attention and feedback with less data to tailor their feedback for more immediate impact and retention.

This parallels with Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s 2 Sigma theory on the best way to teach a student a new skill/knowledge and retain it longer.

Similar to the AI Tutor in the classroom, Benjamin Bloom analyzed teacher-to-many, peer-to-peer, and tutor-to-student methods of learning. The results of the tutor-to-student had the highest results. At the time his study was done, there was no scalable and cost-effective way to provide this in the classroom.

AI has allowed these tutors to be deployed across a large population base and respond at lightning speed.

Our ACES simulator does the same thing. We use AI to play the role of the built-in tutor or coach. Managers have access to very detailed analytics, just like the teachers have, to focus on the tasks an employee may be struggling with in the simulator as a roadmap to use as a way to provide the most relevant coaching and feedback. This allows the manager or trainer to be more Proactive than Reactive.

The report on 60 Minutes also addresses the risks or negatives of using generative AI in the classroom. As with a lot of these systems, there needs to be some form of guardrails in place.

For this reason, our ACES platform uses a combination of rules-based AI and NLP. When using our simulator in a call center, you want to design the simulations based on best practices for any given interaction in that call center. When using generative tools to help you “build” the learning activity, this runs the risk of not having consistent learning for each agent that challenges them to perform the proper tasks following your best practices. Call centers know what type of calls they have and the types of situations employees will be tasked with. Simply pulling examples from the hours of recorded calls can be used to create the scenarios that agents will need to learn how to respond to.

We all know these new generative tools are very attractive and can reduce our workloads tremendously. We still need to be mindful of when we use them and how. I believe we still have a ways to go before we can blindly deploy LLM (large language models) at scale but there is no doubt they are a technology disrupter.

Oct 30

What do Dairy Cows and Contact Centers Have in Common?

By nmunro | AI, call center, collaboration, contact Center, empathy

Cows and Contact Centers

Check out some samples of our contact center simulations

Always On Duty

Dairy cows have to be milked twice a day every day – no days off. Just like contact centers, someone has to tend to them 24 x 7

Bread & Butter

Dairy cows are the prime focus to driving revenue on a farm, just like excellent service from your contact centers make or break your customer retention

Wholistic Systems

Dairy cows rely on the farm equipment to provide food, sanitized environments and supply chains to keep running. Same with contact centers, agents need to have reliable systems, collaborative work environments and safe non-toxic work settings to be productive.

Proud 4-H Member

Jun 03

Did the Movie Wall-E Predict the Future?

By nmunro | AI, bots, empathy

Didn’t Elon Musk say that AI will take away the need for humans to work? I just saw the Pixar movie Wall-E for the first time (I know it was made 16 years ago) and was fascinated by the man-made environment the humans were living in due to the environmental damage done to earth.

The Wall-E movie is an example of what we would be living like if AI replaced all our jobs. They didn’t even need to walk they just floated around with robots feeding them and entertaining them. There were no humans interacting with each other, only “screens” and everyone wore the same clothing.

If current humans lived the same way what would be the impact? Here is a list I made – feel free to add to this in the comments.

Pro- Wall-E Lifestyle	Con- Wall-E Lifestyle
Sleep in late	Weight gain and health risks due to lack of exercise
Stay up late	Lack of human interaction and emotional connections
No need to buy groceries or clothes	Boredom – lack of variety
No commuting time (or Zooms)	Reduced travel
No wars or intercontinental conflicts	No intellectual stimulation
Unlimited free time	Lack of diversity
	Reduce competition reduces innovation
	Removal of social activities and entertainment

Jan 31

Why didi I name the Company Verbal Transactions?

By nmunro | AI, call center, collaboration, empathy, simulations

Why did I name my company Verbal Transactions? Think about it. Any time we speak to someone there is a transaction taking place. Asking your child to take the trash out has a value to it. You want to teach them responsibility and you need to get the garbage out of the house.

When speaking to a customer, you’re providing value to the relationship and the customer is expecting something in return – a transaction.

Recently Peter Cardon, the Bennis Chair in Teaching Excellence at the USC Marshall School of Business published an article in Fast Company to explain that with the increased use of AI, employers are placing more value on soft skills than ever before.

He states “72% of frequent AI users reported that oral communication will become more important, while 50% said that written communication will decrease in value as AI becomes better able to write in a convincingly human way.”

With the threats that AI brings into our lives and workplaces, the values of integrity, compassion, empathy etc. will rise higher in value to help protect us against deep fakes and hallucinations.

We’re seeing more and more employers wanting to provide soft-skill training to employees. One reason may be that the younger employee’s ability to harness their soft skills were stunted during COVID-19.

Just recently I was speaking to a manager in a call center who was stunned at how casual and non-professional some of their younger employee’s chat conversations were with customers.

By using a conversation simulator like our ACES software, we can provide a realistic and scalable way for employers to practice relevant co-worker or customer conversations and put into context why they should steer the conversation in one direction or the other.

Oct 17

It Takes up to 30 Role-Plays To Reach Improvement

By nmunro | AI, bots, sales training, simulations

Extensive Practice Needed to Reach Proficiency

According to Dr. Stephanie Boyer, Professor of Marketing at Bryant University, “It takes our students 15-minute AI-driven role-plays before they have a significant step-change vs. practicing on your customers. Get your teams to practice as much as you can.”

See Example

Dec 20

Simulations Speed time to Proficiency

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, AI, bots, call center, contact Center, simulations

It’s a well-known fact that many call centers are challenged with getting agents up to speed as quickly as possible with a high degree of proficiency. The chart below shows the average time it takes for agents to become proficient. But we want to encourage you to start using simulations – like our ACES simulator

When we work with our customer’s call centers the #1 reason they use us is to get their agents up to speed faster.

Click here to see some examples

Nov 03

Synthetic speech (deep fakes) Are Coming and Getting Better

By nmunro | AI, simulations

Recently I was doing some research on voice technology and came across this company Murf which has a pretty impressive library of text-to-speech voices that sound pretty real. synthetic voice

Here are some samples I created

Another platform I have used that includes real human faces is Synthesia. I have used their voices for different simulation projects.

During a recent presentation for the Chicago eLearning Showcase, another platform many people use is Well Said Labs. I’ve tried all of these and many of these voices work pretty well but there is something to be said for a real voice. As someone who sings professionally as my side hustle, I would hate to think that someday singers may be replaced by AI voices — but it won’t surprise me if this is already being done in the gaming or Meta world.

May 26

1871 Tech Talk Acceleration of Digital Learning Technologies

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, AI, bots, Employee Rewards

Oct 19

Correlation of Smart Phone Use and the Dumbing Down of Our Workforce

By nmunro | Adaptive Learning, AI

There are some pretty strong arguments that the use of Smart Phones has reduced our attention spans. In fact, I bet some of you won’t be able to read this entire article without checking your phone or toggling over to check your email.

Publications like “Are Smartphones Making Us Dumber” and “Is Your Smartphone Making You Fat and Lazy” provide evidence that smartphones are creating a negative impact on our cognitive abilities.

For example, how many people under the age of 30 could use a map to navigate their way to some unknown destination? Don’t get me wrong, I have a very close affection for my GPS “lady” in helping navigate my way through some tricky destinations. But, she has led me astray on occasion to a route that seems to pass by a lot of Dunkin Donut Shops.

This leads me to think about the amount of time allowed for a single training program has gone from an average of 1 hour down to 15 minutes. Is this because we know the end-user attention span is short or is this the only amount of time the organization will allow the learner to be pulled away from their job?

Knowing that a training unit seems to be 15 minutes or less, it’s surprising to find that from 2017 to 2020, large corporations have dedicated more than twice as much time into total hours of training

(Chart from this article)

So, if companies are allowing for more training time per employee but less time for each training activity what was the catalyst that caused this dramatic leap?

My hypothesis is that more content is being digitized and accessible via online courseware/video content and knowledge management but are the employees becoming more skilled just because their employer is providing more content and easier access?

According to a study conducted by Professor Mark Williams University of Sydney Australia, shows that something that is read on a screen will be retained 10-30 percent less than something read on paper.

He also states “Our brains can’t multi-task, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another “

How many apps on your phone send an audible or buzzing signal to you throughout the day? These disruptions take our focus away each time we hear them.

I think we are fooling ourselves that by providing more resources to our employees they will automatically consume them to increase their capacity to do their job. I think organizations are taking the “just Google it” approach to providing resources and information to employees. Why not — I can’t tell you how many things I’ve Googled to bring knowledge to me in the moment I need it.

Does that mean I’ve had become an expert on this –no but it got the job done. I think this has become the attitude of many organizations, by providing enough access to on-demand knowledge, we are doing our jobs.

I hope some of you reading this (if you got this far) can prove me wrong. Time, money and chaos are always going to be a driving force in building an educated workforce. Wouldn’t it be great if your company could bring an industry expert to the table when trying to acquire a new client or present the best trouble-shooting team when malicious hackers break into your network. Companies can have this type of human capital without paying higher prices to recruit top talent from the start.

In closing, it would be great to see examples of companies that spend time on training beyond the 15-minute chunks or treat training as a one-time event. It takes time, practice and feedback to gain long-term knowledge and expertise. I’m a huge fan of technology and the benefits it can provide but let’s find ways to leverage technology in a way that enable employees to build long-term knowledge and build internal experts to become more competitive and more “Smart” without relying on our mobile devices.

Jun 14

Not All IA is Evil

By nmunro | AI, bots, call center, simulations

It seems that AI (artificial intelligence) is getting more bad press than good these days. But my spin is that the good still outways the bad when it comes to the benefits of using AI-based applications and products.

For example, we are using AI to help accelerate the rate at which you can learn a new skill. I’ve seen this approach to using AI in education only at the K-12 level vs. the enterprise level as we are using it. Most other training companies using AI to curate content to help cross-train employees on skills they need for their job. I would say this is one of the easier ways to apply AI technology.

Here is a list of some other “good” ways AI is being used to learn a new skill

Using AI to learn how to speak in ASL (American Sign Language)
Carnegie Learning is using to help teach math in a new way for K-12 students
ACES (our own platform) for ensuring call center employees can demonstrate the appropriate level of English proficiency

One tail of caution though, we really want to ensure that we try to reduce the amount of bias that inherently may be embedded with these systems. I was recently asked by one of our clients if we could prove our AI did not contain any bias. I applaud them for asking this question as — again, this would suggest some sort of “evil” intent is being used.

We were fortunate to find a third-party study that showed our AI back-end (Microsoft’s NLP engine) scored the lowest word error rate. So as Spider Man’s uncle says “With great power comes great responsibility”

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