What’s in the womb of future of Indian Metro Railway: AI Powered Customer Service?
Have you ever tried talking to Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa? Isn’t it amazing? It helps us manage our task, make calls on our behalf, organize stuffs and fix meetings for us. However, Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa are most probably the only AI bots that most of us have interacted with so far. AI bots are being used in several fields. Continuous development in the field of Artificial Intelligence is going to unveil the many technological miracles in coming years. AI Powered customer services is one of such miracles which has taken every industry by a storm. AI Powered customer services not only makes every purchase interactive but also it has potential to reduce the human resource cost involved in customer services operations, thus making it more profitable tool for business.
For those readers, who don’t have any Idea about Artificial Intelligence, it is a technology which allows machines to have human cognitive functions like learning and problem solving. In simpler words, with the help of this technology, machines can act and work like humans.
How does it work?
Artificial Intelligence works on two major technologies which are Machine learning and Natural language processing. In Machine learning technology, a large amount of data is fed to the computing system so that it can learn from it. YouTube and Facebook use machine learning technology to suggest you the videos that you may want to watch or the profiles of people that you may want to connect with respectively. Basically, it churns out your data and provides you suggestion based on your online behavior. Another major technology in Artificial Intelligence is Natural language processing. Our computers don’t understand our spoken or written languages, it only understands the binary codes which are in zeros and ones. With the help of this technology, it converts our languages in to binary codes and interprets our conversation to respond to it.
Where and how it can be used in Indian Metro Railways?
Delhi Metro has equipped its stations with Ticket vending machines. Ticket vending machines can be improvised with the help AI technologies. Al technologies can allow Ticket vending machines to listen and respond to customer requests. For example, those who doesn’t know how to operate the machine, can just talk with machine. Another feature that I can think of is that there can be vending time restrictions in ticket vending machines. For example, if last revenue train for certain train has already departed then ticket vending machine should not vend the tokens for that station directly. It should display and speak that “The last revenue train for that particular station has been already departed, do you still wish to buy a token to that station?”. These types of features will reduce the need of station agents and can reduce the operative expensive to greater level.
Image Credit: DMRC
Author:
Name: Ranjesh Kumar
Company: Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation
