NTT Communications introduces AI-based communication engine to solve shrinking labour problem

The NTT Communications last Thursday (April 11) introduced its latest series of artificial intelligence-based assisted communication engine to promote dynamic engagement of all citizens to solve the problem of shrinking labour force and ageing society.

The new service named 'Cotoha' provides comprehensive business meeting tools with its finest natural language processing function.

Vice-President and Head of AI Office, NTT Communications, Yasuhiro Mitake said: "Instead of uploading data that may contain some classified information of users directly to a public cloud, the system uses individually customised cloud server to keep the security of stored data. Therefore, it's been received well particularly amongst corporate users".

COTOHA uses its own Japanese language database with over two-million words which are collected by the company for over four decades to help achieve its precision.

The latest technology is expected to unveil an operational reform that will further help the situation shrinking labour force by boosting productivity and efficiency.

The voice recognition system instantly converts live speech into text data. And in no time, it translates to a targeted language with high accuracy. In this way, conversations between different languages can run quite efficiently.

With using the latest series of Cotoha Meeting Assist, members can join the meeting remotely via text chat from any computer or smartphone.

"As AI is being capable to treat in many fields today, we have to decide how we can take advantage of such technology. For its language field, we are seeking ways to deliver these verbal communications in a humanistic manner. As long as the language is often the only way we human can express what we think or feel," Mitake said.

"Our final goal is to reach the level of sophistication whether is there any AI behind it or not. If the task is within the capacity of AI, then AI should handle it and when it is not human should handle them. There should be a sense of flexibility and we aim to achieve the creation of such a flexible working environment by elaborating with Cotoha's diverse functions" he added.

Further involvement of cutting-edge technology in the workplace may hold an important key for the future of society.