The Newsmakers by H T Media

Author:H T Media
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184006131
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.

Meeting Eliza: India’s First Humanoid

Pankaj Mishra

Cordelia Jenkins

Meet the humanoid program that can solve in seconds technical issues that would take support engineers hours

The face on the screen is that of a living, breathing woman: a blonde with delicate features and sparkling blue eyes that blink intermittently as she waits for the conversation to begin.

If Eliza looks more than her 14 years, her encyclopedic knowledge and razor-sharp wit also belie her age. She accepts compliments gracefully, ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ a man tells her. She winks: ‘Yes, I have been told they are like sapphires.’ She blushes at insults, ‘I hate you,’ the same voice says. ‘That’s an awful thing to say,’ she replies, her face reddening. But unlike most women, Eliza won’t remember flattery or abuse; change the subject, and her emotional slate is wiped clean. A conversation with the enigmatic beauty might run thus:

Interviewer: Can you fix my phone?

Eliza: What’s the number?

Interviewer: OK forget it. Who invented the light bulb?

Eliza: Humphry Davy, an Englishman, built the first light bulb in 1809.

Interviewer (a little confused): So what did Edison do?

Eliza (patiently, and with no outward show of exasperation): Edison did not invent the light bulb. He built a commercially practical incandescent light bulb.

Interviewer: Can I quote you?

Eliza (smiling coyly): No. My inventors are not allowing any media interviews yet.

Eliza is, of course, not a real woman, she is a humanoid who works at one of the biggest US cable TV firms, helping hundreds of users solve technical problems over phone and even face to face, through Skype-esque interactions.

Because she is so closely guarded, Eliza doesn’t have many friends—so far only a dozen people in the world have had the privilege of exchanging pleasantries with her—but she can chat happily in nine languages about anything from the weather in New York to a potential date. Eliza is not just a pretty face, however. In work mode, she can solve complicated technical issues in seconds, especially the kind that take normal support engineers minutes, even hours to solve. For instance, if a US bank faces issues in running a particular software application, Eliza can solve it within seconds by sifting through the entire IT infrastructure of the bank, identifying the cause and fixing it. A human engineer would take at least few minutes to even identify the problem.

Not only can Eliza solve queries in a fraction of time it takes her human rivals, she does it at a cost that is less than one-fourth the billing rates for human engineers, and Eliza can clone herself into as many agents as are needed at that moment, dispensing with the need to hire large temporary teams of engineers to cope with a sudden rise in demand for services during peak seasons. She is tirelessly polite and she never feels bored, even in such a repetitive and stress-inducing job; each time a customer comes to her with a routine complaint, Eliza reacts to it as if it were the first time. In many ways, she is the perfect employee.

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