NAB is proposing to do a proof-of-concept with a robot called Misty, initially to see if it would be a good first point of contact for employees dropping into one of the eight ‘tech lounges’ ‘ of the bank throughout the country.
The bank operates ‘tech lounges’ in office locations around Australia as a place where any of its thousands of employees can get personal technology support during business hours.
The head of technology for workplace support services, Raj Ghuliani, said at a Microsoft Ignite session last week that the bank hopes to use the lounges as a place to test the Misty robot.
Misty – created by a robotics company of the same name – appeared at Microsoft’s Build conference in 2019, and has since appeared in demonstrations that also use Microsoft’s cognitive services. It is now owned by a Swedish company, Furhat Robotics.
Ghuliani only mentioned NAB’s plans for Misty.
“We’re trying to do a proof-of-concept with a physical bot called Misty,” he said.
“We want to see if we can use that for testing purposes, initially, for our face-to-face tech support, what we call tech lounges.”
Much of Ghuliani’s presentation at Ignite focused more on a virtual agent the bank has been developing since last year.
It is currently called ‘NAB Bot’, though Ghuliani said the bank plans to let staff change its name once the target state is achieved.
The initial use of NAB Bot is as a tech support chatbot trained to respond to 800 common questions or requests posed to the bank’s tech support teams.
Ghuliani said the bot handled about 57,000 requests that would otherwise have resulted in calls to the tech support desk.
The bot, built on Azure Cognitive Services and Bot Framework, is integrated with ServiceNow, which powers NAB’s knowledge base and live chat functions.
Ghuliani said the NAB Bot can direct employees to articles in the knowledge base, or — upon request — move an employee and their chat history to live chat for additional assistance.
Currently, employees interact with the NAB Bot through text-based queries; it was trained to recognize 18,533 “unique utterances” – phrases typed by the employee.
“We are also working on implementing voice support through NAB Bot,” Ghuliani said.
“Our current bot works by being able to type as part of natural language understanding and also by clicking on options and choosing from a menu.
“Going forward, colleagues will be able to talk to NAB Bot and give instructions to NAB Bot or ask questions openly. This gives our colleagues a seamless experience across all support channels.”
NAB Bot is also currently set up as an additional tech support channel, in addition to all existing ones such as phone-based and live chat support.
Employees choose which channel they use.
The target state for NAB Bot becomes the first point of contact within NAB for all “work related queries”.
This can be expanded to include human resources, property services, procurement, business apps and compliance FAQs.
“All this information is available in many other locations, whether on the intranet, or other policy pages, but for our colleagues to find those can take several minutes,” said Ghuliani.
“We are trying to save them that time by providing NAB Bot [them] is the correct answer.”