Face facts
Annie Shu leads a Westpac innovation team that brought to life a digital human designed to help young job-seekers. By Victoria Baker.
the innovation space for three to four years and every day is a new day,” says Annie Shu. “The more time I spend in the space, the less I feel I know.” As leader of the strategy and innovation team at Westpac, she describes the role of her team as bringing emerging technologies and capabilities to the bank in order to create a good customer experience. Finding and getting excited about new technology is easy; what’s more difficult is using it to implement meaningful change that can make an impact for at least a three-to-five-year period, before a new wave of innovation arrives.
Maintaining a culture of innovation in a corporation – especially one as traditional and as regulated as banking – can be challenging. “I look at our team as a startup inside a large organisation,” says Shu. “We are essentially creating something out of nothing. We have to think creatively about solving our customers’ challenges in a different way, and sometimes that means reassessing processes and functions that have existed for decades so we can reshape them for the future.” Around 70 per cent of her team are female, with a wide span of ages, and work from three states in collaboration with the bank’s technology, marketing, compliance and legal teams.
Meet Wendy, the result of one such collaboration, and an award-winning innovation in the banking sphere. “I’m a digital job coach,” she says in a friendly yet authoritative voice. “I live in the digital world and I help young people with finding their first jobs.” She is a virtual human, a digital persona, an avatar. She lives on screen to answer questions in one subject area, although she does offer some small talk, even some jokes. As you talk, she can respond to your facial cues – she may smile back at you or pick up on a confused expression.
Wendy is a complex mix of computer vision, artificial intelligence and speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology. Laura Higgins, an AI specialist for Westpac based in Adelaide, worked on creating Wendy’s knowledge base. “As a virtual human, she is a digitally rendered image of a person,” says Higgins. “She has her own voice, she has her own persona, and she has an AIpowered brain. She’s got both emotional and academic intelligence, so she can echo back a smile and see if you’re sad but she can also answer factual questions.”
For Higgins, working on Wendy’s knowledge base involved building up a large number of likely questions into a dialogue tree, grouping those by intent and then specifying responses based on different knowledge entities. Higgins and her colleagues did this from scratch until Wendy started talking to real humans, when more information became available. There were a few phrases and interpretations they’d missed though. “Someone asked Wendy whether their job interview outfit needed to be ‘on fleek’,” says Higgins. She didn’t understand – but she does now. “I know she’s not human and doesn’t have a personality – we built that,” says Higgins. “But
“I’VE BEEN IN
you have to respect her persona, so everything we did fitted into that. We spent a lot of time rejigging sentences on the basis of: ‘Wendy wouldn’t say that!’”
The fact that Wendy converses with humans, and mainly teenagers, does throw up challenges. For Higgins, it was important to ensure Wendy was able to respond to sadness (by referring the customer elsewhere; she is not equipped for any kind of counselling) and that her conversation was helpful rather than patronising, humorous but not awkward. For Shu’s team, considerations included protecting the privacy of the data of people interacting with her while still getting consent to analyse data received in order to improve the algorithms driving Wendy.
Many businesses are using chatbots for these interactions. So why the extra effort of creating a digital human? “We were thinking about how we engage a customer when we can’t see them face-to-face – how do we build a rapport with them through a computer?” says Shu. “With a purely ‘chat’ capability, you’re missing a large portion of emotional connection that we convey through facial expressions, hand gestures and voice variations.” Wendy’s physicality, voice and movements were created by Soul Machines, a business based in San Francisco and Auckland that specialises in producing digital humans to allow brands to communicate with customers in a new way. But her physical characteristics were influenced by Westpac’s market research. “We did a huge amount of research,” says Shu. “Wendy’s face is an amalgam created from ABS Census data, so she is a combination of ethnic backgrounds mixed together.” As to the choice between a female, male and even a non-human avatar, Shu says it came down to trust. “Our research showed overwhelmingly that the female persona is the one that people said they trusted, wanted to engage with, and didn’t feel intimidated by when asking questions.”
Shu is cognisant of the fact that young people don’t want to walk into a bank branch or even make a phone call, but would rather the bank meet them. “Our young customers want to interact with us through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They want to have the choice of when and where to interact with us. They are comfortable in their own homes and they expect us to have this kind of technology. We learned that finding an impartial, unbiased source of information is hard for them and they don’t want to be judged on the questions they ask.”
The challenge – and reward – of the Wendy project for Higgins was building something that people want to use. “The technology she has is amazing, but it’s complicated,” she says. “What we’ve built in Wendy is a system that uses amazing technology and complicated knowledge and delivers it to people in a way that’s really accessible and easy to use.” Wendy herself is somewhat modest about her achievements, but optimistic about her future. “There’s so much left to learn about the world, but I’d like to think I’m a quick learner,” she says.
“She’s got both emotional and academic intelligence, so she can echo back a smile but she can also answer factual questions”