Intelligent voice- recognition app to speed recovery

These are chal­leng­ing times and we have all had to adapt rapid­ly to very nec­es­sary changes in behav­iour, activ­i­ty and pur­pose. The same can also be said for the role of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), as the tech­nol­o­gy has found plen­ty of new appli­ca­tions in the cur­rent land­scape.

In a bid to flat­ten the curve of coro­n­avirus infec­tions, AI has been rapid­ly repur­posed and is now being employed in tasks that range from screen­ing and diag­no­sis to con­tain­ment and drug devel­op­ment.

Beyond this, AI could also have a cru­cial role to play in the severe knock-on effect the pan­dem­ic has had on our econ­o­my and the pro­found impact that mea­sures to slow the spread of the dis­ease have had on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

The impor­tance of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is one thing that hasn’t changed in recent months. In fact, it’s becom­ing even more cru­cial for indi­vid­u­als and indus­tries fac­ing an increased work­load through greater demand and reduced staffing.

Vol­ume is an award-win­ning inno­va­tion com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in the devel­op­ment of con­ver­sa­tion­al AI plat­forms and its peo­ple are focused on using their exper­tise to break an over-reliance on key­boards in order to boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty through speech.

One of the unique things about Fru­ut is that users can embed actions with­in their dic­ta­tions

Fru­ut, is a new AI-pow­ered voice-recog­ni­tion app, that can reduce the time it takes to per­form pro­duc­tiv­i­ty-sap­ping admin tasks by allow­ing users to talk direct­ly to their smart device rather than type the myr­i­ad of key-based tasks that are usu­al­ly required as part of their job descrip­tion.

From health­care pro­fes­sion­als and field engi­neers to police offi­cers and rela­tion­ship man­agers, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is often hob­bled by the need to gen­er­ate reports, which often takes up a huge pro­por­tion of the aver­age work­day. Com­pound­ing this prob­lem is the very human desire to get past this stage and progress to some­thing more valu­able, which can lead to rushed work and inac­cu­rate report­ing.

Fru­ut enables pro­fes­sion­als to reduce the time it takes to write up reports by sim­ply speak­ing into their smart­phones, while any tasks or actions can be detect­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly and assigned to col­leagues through their pre­ferred plan­ning or col­lab­o­ra­tion tools.

To see how Fruut’s AI would work in the real world we can apply it to one of the many busi­ness­es affect­ed by the cur­rent cri­sis: com­mer­cial bank­ing.

When the gov­ern­ment realised the effect COVID-19 was going to have on the econ­o­my, it announced a pack­age of mea­sures to help every­one from estab­lished busi­ness­es to the self-employed.

One of those mea­sures was the Coro­n­avirus Busi­ness Inter­rup­tion Loan (CBIL), which was seen as wel­come relief for many small and medi­um-sized busi­ness­es.

NatWest recent­ly revealed it’s hav­ing to field near­ly ten times as many calls from firms try­ing to secure emer­gency loans, but the appli­ca­tion process was no dif­fer­ent to at any oth­er time, leav­ing rela­tion­ship man­agers across the bank­ing sec­tor in dan­ger of becom­ing over­whelmed.

This is large­ly due to the fact that their required inputs remained con­strained by the speed and accu­ra­cy with which they could type the essen­tial infor­ma­tion sup­plied by busi­ness cus­tomers look­ing for help, advice and sup­port.

“Fru­ut would allow a rela­tion­ship man­ag­er to assess and process more CBIL appli­ca­tions faster,” says Volume’s chief exec­u­tive, Chris Sykes. “All data entry is han­dled by the AI and is seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed into the bank’s cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment sys­tem and the rela­tion­ship manager’s dai­ly col­lab­o­ra­tion tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Plan­ner.

“By talk­ing, rather than typ­ing, the time tak­en to cre­ate a report can be reduced by 75 per cent. Not only does this help reduce admin time, it’s a faster time to res­o­lu­tion for the con­cerned cus­tomer.”

And Fru­ut is unique in that it uses nat­ur­al-lan­guage under­stand­ing, which
neu­tralis­es one of the peren­ni­al prob­lems users often expe­ri­ence with speech-to-text tech­nol­o­gy: a high lev­el of errors in the tran­script.

“Through user inter­ac­tions, we have the abil­i­ty to train the app to under­stand the busi­ness lan­guage of an organ­i­sa­tion, like a bank, so you can speak as nat­u­ral­ly as pos­si­ble to a dig­i­tal assis­tant,” says Sykes. “The more user inter­ac­tions the app receives, the more intu­itive it becomes. This way, work­ers aren’t in dan­ger of wast­ing valu­able time cor­rect­ing their own tran­scripts.”

One of the unique things about Fru­ut is that dur­ing the dic­ta­tion process, users can embed actions with­in the report, for exam­ple telling Fru­ut a client would like to book a meet­ing, see some con­tracts or review a doc­u­ment.

Fru­ut will also con­tin­ue a dia­logue with the user, as Sykes explains: “Each action will be cat­e­gorised, so the sys­tem knows if it requires more infor­ma­tion from the user to com­plete the action, and asks clar­i­fy­ing ques­tions if there is miss­ing infor­ma­tion.” He con­tin­ues: “For exam­ple, for book­ing a meet­ing, Fru­ut will need to know when the meet­ing needs to hap­pen, who needs to set it up and where the meet­ing will take place, online or face to face.”

This dia­logue is car­ried out using voice requests from Fru­ut back to the user. Once the user has pro­vid­ed the miss­ing infor­ma­tion, Fru­ut gen­er­ates the final report and sends it to the rel­e­vant work­flow tools while the actions are sent to a plan­ning tool, such as Microsoft Plan­ner, and auto­mat­i­cal­ly assigned to the rel­e­vant col­leagues for exe­cu­tion.

Fru­ut backs up its cus­tomer-fac­ing skills with a facil­i­ty to record pri­vate reports, on or offline, for con­fi­den­tial or per­son­al notes, mak­ing it a one-stop app that is always on and ready to go. This stream­lin­ing frees up more time for indi­vid­u­als to engage in high­er-val­ue inter­ac­tions that will ben­e­fit their busi­ness, as well as lead to increased cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.

In con­clu­sion, Fru­ut has arrived at a crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant time when it’s impor­tant we review the habits and work prac­tices that have been in place for some time and iden­ti­fy if they are hold­ing us back from pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Free­ing our­selves from our key­boards and employ­ing advanced AI might be one of those habits, and Fru­ut will allow us to have a direct con­ver­sa­tion with the tech­nol­o­gy we car­ry around with us every day, boost­ing error-free pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Now is the time to pick fruut.ai, get talk­ing and rev­o­lu­tionise work­flow