Published on the 06/11/2018 | Written by Heather Wright

Uncanny belief that uncanny interactions will simplify anything…

Digital assistants and ‘digital humans’ appear to have become all the rage. While the Department of Human Services is expanding its lineup of digital assistants, across the Tasman four New Zealand government departments have jumped on the band wagon of trials of ‘digital humans’ – complete with digital avatars – trying to improve customer experience.

Human Services announced last week that it had rolled out ‘Charles’ to provide ‘access to instant help’ for Australia’s 14 million myGov account holders. Charles joins two other public facing assistants, ‘Sam’ and ‘Oliver’, who have been in use since early last year, answering more than two million questions. The department also has a number of virtual assistants being used internally, and rolled out ‘Roxy’ in October 2016 to help staff process online claims.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand the Ministry for Primary Industries, NZ Customs, Inland Revenue and the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have been working with Datacom on the project to see if AI, fronted by a weird e-human, has the potential to make it easier for the business citizenry to interact with the government in complex multi-agency contexts.

The actual results are somewhat irrelevant. The PR spinoff has already paid its dues, which is more what is behind the uptake than any real service enhancement. This is more about marketing and entertainment. Surprisingly these things haven’t been released in a blockchain flavour (yet).

The latest Kiwi digital assistant, Tai, MBIE’s statement enthuses, is ‘a 25-year-old New Zealander who can navigate his way through complex information across multiple government websites and provide you with answers to your questions in the blink of an eye’.

After a proof of concept completed in July, the agencies have been focusing the pilot on honey exporting ‘because it requires businesses to navigate across two government agencies – MPI and Customs’.

“We know that navigating complex exporting requirements across our two government agencies can be confusing, complicated and time consuming,” MPI and Customs say.

There was no accompanying suggestion there would be any simplification in the processes themselves.

Business users from the apiculture and exporting community were able to ask export questions in natural language and receive responses, also in plain language.

Presumably having a digital ‘human’ interface makes it easier for us to interact with a machine. MBIE, itself, says the objective of the proof of concept was to find out if conversational AI works in a cross-agency regulatory context and if businesses would be open to having a conversation with a machine to reduce their effort searching for information.

The findings? Not yet open for public consumption.

Refreshingly, Tai is a male after the march of female digital humans we’ve been seeing in recent months – Mercedes Benz’ Sarah, Air New Zealand’s Sophie, ANZ’s Jamie (all courtesy of Soul Machines) and another Sophie, this time for Money 20/20, Kiri (Vodafone), Josie (ASB) and Vai (Auckland Airport) all courtesy of FaceMe.

Here at iStart, we’re not sold on whether the business community is ready to trust any 25-year-old to be the ‘expert’ on all things government, let alone one that is digitally enabled. (Thankfully, Charles doesn’t come with a profile.)

We reckon there’s something a little weird with the growing crop of digi-sistants, and it’s not only that uncanny valley where they appear almost, but not quite, human with their movements, particularly in the lip department. It’s also that they all look the same, clearly modelled on the same person. Take a look at the images below of Jamie, Sophie V1 and Sarah.

Have a chat to Jamie at ANZ and then to Sophie at Air New Zealand (this PR spinner is yet to be let loose on an Air NZ domain). Once you’ve calmed down from the numbingly circular conversation with Jamie suggesting ‘here’s the link to click’ (thanks, I could have googled that) the two personas are interchangeable, on looks and voice (let’s hope Sophie comes with a sense of humour at least). In a world where we keep hearing that diversity and personalisation are so important, these assistants are suffering a bad case of copy-rexia.

One of the earlier digital virtual assistants – developed by the National Disability Insurance Agency, Soul Machines, FaceMe and IBM – stumbled with the Turnbull government putting the kibosh on Nadia’s public debut after other high-profile IT incidents including the Census debacle, and robo-debt fiasco.

Nadia had garnered plenty of attention because of its use of Oscar winner  Cate Blanchett as the voice of Nadia.

In August Marie Johnson, former head of technology at NDIA defended the Nadia project, arguing that the programme should be reinstituted and run by NDIA as a strategic capability.

In a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the NDIA’s ICT systems, Johnson said the Nadia innovation started ‘first and foremost as a question of human rights’, providing augmentative and alternative communication and the ability for people to be able to receive and impart information and ideas on an equal basis.

For people with severe physical disabilities, communicating with a semi-intelligent avatar would seem to make some sense (although the keystrokes to get there are perhaps conveniently forgotten).

For your average warm blooded human? Not so much.