HONG KONG, 3 October 2022: Cathay is improving its customers’ digital experience by launching an advanced conversational artificial intelligence (AI) in partnership with Fano Labs, a Hong Kong-based language AI company.
The new conversational AI developed in partnership with Fano Labs will improve the efficiency and productivity of the airline’s AI chatbots, enabling them to provide more accurate responses to customers’ queries.
As demand for travel returns, Cathay is anticipating an increase in call and chat traffic volume, with post-Covid travel enquiries growing rapidly in the past few months. The airline has also seen a shift in customer behaviours, turning from traditional hotlines to digital channels such as WhatsApp and WeChat for more instant responses. Digital channel usage has experienced monthly growth of 10-20% over recent months as Cathay continues to add back more flight capacity.
The most challenging task is to find large volumes of high-quality data to train the chatbot to understand what people are asking and why to provide proper responses. Such chatbot training is often time-consuming and expensive, requiring human “AI Trainers” to look at historical data to see how customers interacted with the chatbot, manually extract, clean, and annotate useful portions of this historical data, and then feed it back into the chatbot for learning.
To address these challenges, Cathay and Fano Labs have become one of the first in the market to have successfully developed and launched the Conversational AI Training Excellence platform that uses AI technologies to train AI chatbots. The “Trainer AI” leverages Fano Labs’ Callinter product to analyse interactions with customers, including voice calls, live chats, WeChat messages, and WhatsApp messages, and automatically group these data into different categories for further processing before presenting the results to a human supervisor for review and approval. The AI chatbot then learns from the data extracted by the trainer AI.
With this system in place, Cathay expects to reduce the time needed to train chatbots by 50%, meaning a regular four to six-week learning cycle will be shortened to just one or two weeks.
Cathay Director Digital and IT Lawrence Fong said: “As a company with more than seven decades in Hong Kong, we are committed to supporting local tech startups such as Fano Labs and innovating together to build our digital leadership – a pillar for achieving our vision of becoming one of the world’s greatest service brands. This collaborative effort in Conversational AI technology is the latest example of how we can collaborate with startups to develop mutually beneficial partnerships and ultimately bring benefits and enhanced service to our customers.”
