1. Outlook for Multilingual Dialogue Platform
Hitachi has developed HRB, a multilingual dialogue platform for dealing with inbound tourists, whose numbers have been rising over recent years. By assisting such dealings and facilitating the provision of information, the platform is intended to reduce workloads and time spent on these activities. The HRB platform supports a number of different artificial intelligence (AI) engines for things like speech recognition and translation and is designed to provide consistent operation across a broad range of channels, devices, and engines. Standardization of interfaces and knowledge reduces the cost of adoption and, by enabling the collection and analysis of customer service logs, the platform has potential uses in business process improvement.
A speech translation service for Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean that uses a translation engine developed for tourist and railway applications is currently available (a version based on fixed phrases only was released in August 2019, with machine translation to be released in April 2021) and plans include developing the product into a dialogue platform through the incorporation of additional engines such as for digital dialogue and image recognition. Future plans include the further development of non-industry-specific functions to improve efficiency and reduce workload, including support for verification by means of facial recognition and the automation of customer dialogues for routine tasks.