BPOs and Robots
My sister is in Japan right now, with her husband who is working on a project in Japan for Cognizant Technologies. They are having loads of fun and seem to be discovering new things every day. My sister was telling me the other day about the cool robots they have in Japan.
One of them is Aibo the robot dog that is made by Sony.
My brother-in-law was telling me about a robot receptionist that has been designed, that can recognize voices and perform some of the basic functions of a receptionist.
And this got me thinking about BPOs.
For some time, there was a lot of enthusiasm about robots potentially taking over a large portion of manufacturing activities because they were more accurate, they never got tired, they never went on strike etc ... However, this never took off on a large scale because of the costs involved and that lead to a large scale movement of manufacturing to China in search of cheap wages.
This situation exists, albeit on a smaller scale with BPO's/Call Centers. The lower wages in India are driving companies to set up call centers there. But what if robots empowered with speech recognition were made available at a commerically viable price ? Would we have armies of robots answering customer service calls ?
One of them is Aibo the robot dog that is made by Sony.
My brother-in-law was telling me about a robot receptionist that has been designed, that can recognize voices and perform some of the basic functions of a receptionist.
And this got me thinking about BPOs.
For some time, there was a lot of enthusiasm about robots potentially taking over a large portion of manufacturing activities because they were more accurate, they never got tired, they never went on strike etc ... However, this never took off on a large scale because of the costs involved and that lead to a large scale movement of manufacturing to China in search of cheap wages.
This situation exists, albeit on a smaller scale with BPO's/Call Centers. The lower wages in India are driving companies to set up call centers there. But what if robots empowered with speech recognition were made available at a commerically viable price ? Would we have armies of robots answering customer service calls ?
Comments
I guess the idea never really took off due to several AI limitations. You can never predict what your next caller will be and what he would want.
Most of the simple features are automated with most call centres - like checking your credit or balance or listen to transaction history.
Robots cannot replace humans when we need to sell. emotions I guess work better there.