AMMAN — Voice
assistants like
Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri have become ubiquitous
throughout the world. But up until recently, there were few options available
for Arabic-speakers.
اضافة اعلان
The lack
of Arabic voice assistants for the Middle East market inspired Sari Hweitat to
create
Xina AI, the world's first Arabic Interactive Voice Assistant (IVA).
"Over
the last few years, big technology companies such as
Google and Amazon have built
smart voice assistants, but there has been no attention on the Arabic language,”
said the CEO and founder in an interview with
Jordan News.
“As a
result, I decided to design an Arabic voice assistant that understands Arabic
and local dialects around the Arab world, starting with Jordan and its dialect.
We have nearly 22 countries; each country has its own distinct dialect, and
artificial intelligence finds it challenging to grasp these dialects.”
Hweitat
explained that Xina is not a website but an artificial intelligence product
that works kind of like Apple’s Siri, “the only
difference is that we sell the solution to call center corporations rather than
providing it directly to users.”
“For example, when you phone a telecom firm, you
will be connected to a call center, where you will be greeted by an agent. He
will make every effort to assist you, and what we do is assist call centers by
absorbing large volumes of calls using artificial intelligence. It can take
your call, figure out why you're calling, and assist you in resolving the
issue."
Xina AI hopes
to be at the forefront of the Arab region's digital transformation of call and
customer service by incorporating artificial intelligence and natural language
generation into day-to-day call center operations. The project combines natural
language processing, Arabic speech recognition, and speech synthesis into one
system.
"The traditional difficulties for any product based on artificial
intelligence is data availability,” said Hweitat. “This means that the biggest
obstacle facing artificial intelligence companies today is the availability of
data because, without data, artificial intelligence will be of no use.”
He added that “financing the research and development” constitutes
another challenge.
The founder believes that Xina AI will be a
huge Arab success story in the future. “It is not possible to achieve anything
in life if we listen to other people's negative statements,” he said.
"It is a project in its early stages, but
corporations are interested in our AI solution," he continued. "Right
now, we have 12 (employees), and by the end of the year, I want to have
18."
"We
sell to call center organizations, and the call center and Xina AI are
integrated," Hweitat added. “Everything is cloud-based, and we communicate
with our customers in this manner. You have no choice but to call the call
center, where Xina AI will accept your call in place of a customer support
representative."
He
explained that using Xina is less expensive for call centers than traditional
customer service.
“We
charge by the minute for our services,” he said. “This means that the more
minutes you have, the more expensive it is, and the fewer minutes you have, the
less expensive it is. However, the cost of a minute for artificial intelligence
is always less than the cost of a minute for a typical customer support
representative.”
“We are
now focusing on customer service, although many of the technology applications
that we have developed can be utilized in the future in transcribing or quality
assurance between customer service and customers. Still, for the time being, we
are concentrating on customer service.”
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