Anyone who's listened to the daily prime ministerial covid-19 briefings knows there is a boatload of detail that comes with each different alert level under lockdown.
From this week, Soul Machines is making one of its otherworldly humanoids available to the New Zealand public, armed with official information from a growing range of sources to help businesses, in particular, navigate the physically isolated minefield that is lockdown alert level 3.
By mid-May, when the country hopes to move to something a bit more like normal – alert level 2 – the Auckland-based global pioneers in putting a human face on artificial intelligence will have stuffed Bella with a new load of information that lets ordinary people ask an extraordinary online humanoid anything to do with how life in a covid-19 world is supposed to work.
Note: You can't ask Bella anything. Just anything that her small army of 'conversational content writers' puts into her 'natural language processing centre', the mildly Orwellian name given to the NLP software that generates Bella's remarkably human voice.
This week, the Auckland business organisation the Employers and Manufacturers Association will be loading up detailed information from its business advisory databases, to join material supplied by innovation hubs including NZ Tech, the Tech Futures Lab, The IceHouse, Angel Association, and Summer of Tech.
"This is very new technology," said Soul Machines chief executive Greg Cross, who has spent an uncharacteristic five weeks in Auckland instead of constantly flying between clients and Soul Machines various offshore labs. "We saw this as a chance not just to help but to show how we think about the dissemination of information."
That humanoid voice is also accompanied by a remarkably human face that blinks, smiles, frowns and reacts to the facial expressions she can 'see' from her side of the computer screen when anyone approaches her with a question.
"Machines aren't smart enough to create conversational content themselves," Cross said. "We have teams of people who write conversational content and encode that into the NLP engines for us."
Those teams can work in any language, which means that Bella can speak any language too.
However, no matter what lingo she and the range of other almost-human characters that Soul Machines has created for customers around the world speak, they all share one thing.
That is Soul Machines' digital replication of the way the human brain processes information to produce emotional reactions.
Bella has a heart beat, she breathes, and she has the software equivalent of a brain stem, all to create what Soul Machines believes will become a kind of bridge between the keyboard sterility of a corporate chatbot and a real-life provider of information, such as a call centre operator.
It is this science and technology that has attracted US$65 million of funding, US$40 million of it just before the covid-19 pandemic broke, from a clutch of high-quality venture capitalists in Hong Kong, Singapore, Silicon Valley and Europe.
"Chatbots are good for simple questions," says Cross. "Where Bella becomes useful is if you're talking about a product or a brand and you want to create a personal experience which is emotionally engaging" but is also online or at least provided in a digital way.
He concedes that the almost, but not quite lifelike experience of speaking to Bella or one of her Soul Machine mates, such as ANZ Bank's Jamie, can be "challenging" first time round.
But the slight imperfection is in part a nod to authenticity, he said.
"We are always really up-front. The objective is to build a trust relationship. It's very important to us that we're not trying to trick you. Bella is not a real person. She's a digital person. She doesn't know everything."
What she can do, however, is act as a bridge that many people find easier to use than other types of online tools to find basic things out, and be referred to a real human being for truly complicated problems.
While the promise of Bella-type technology was already well down the track before covid-19, Cross believes the whole "race to digital" will heat up now as the short term requirement for physical distancing starts to normalise digital commerce and interaction.
"We are certainly very optimistic at this point that there will be some exciting opportunities for us as economic come back to life and people really invest in the digital future."
