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Virtual Assistant Home Page
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Self Service Home Page
Inspiration
There's a tidal wave approaching - jobs that require lower skill levels are increasingly being displaced by advances in AI and automation across a range of industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and last but not least, banking. Banks are working on this, but in the pursuit of optimizing for cost and efficiency, a key value that customers want is often missed - personalized assistance. We think there's a huge opportunity for a forward-thinking banking institution to use the help of a start-up's nimbleness to create a much more personalized and inclusive virtual assistant for all communities.
What it does
Our team, Elephant, has built a virtual assistant called Ada, that recognizes by voice our customers' request, and can direct them to the appropriate service, help page, or even a human representative (i.e. financial advisor, etc.) that most fits their profile. With built-in translation capabilities, customers can choose to complete the interaction in any language they prefer.
How we built it
We used Amazon-Sumerian for the virtual assistant interface, Amazon-Sagemaker for analyzing the Interac/TD data to match customers with appropriate human advisors, Amazon-Translate for language translation, Amazon-Polly for the voice interaction, AWS Lamba, Python, Jupyter, and Node.
Challenges we ran into
We spent close to 4 hours speaking to mentors and researching the space to define a problem space that could be addressed by a group of 6 developers, business people, and designers over a weekend. We probed various ideas such as predicting financial distress, improved banking user interface for seniors, and encouraging sustainable spending, but we ultimately landed on our current idea as we believe it satisfies the criteria of Originality, Innovation, Difficulty, and Business Value the best.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is the first time we've played around with many of these Amazon Web Services - Sumerian, Polly, and Translate. We think as a first attempt, we've accomplished a significant amount of development, and really look forward to what we can do beyond a weekend hackathon.
What we learned
The banking industry is due for disruption. There are most definitely areas in the value chain of banking that will be best served by a start-up or an innovations department.
What's next for Elephant
Since Elephant is consisted of young professionals with entrepreneurial backgrounds, throughout the weekend we've found that there's really something in this space that could only be solved by a start-up's nimbleness and agility. We're open to pivoting our virtual assistant idea as we pursue further into this space beyond a weekend hackathon, and would really benefit from any assistance or resources we could get to help continue our efforts.
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