South Koreans will be aided by artificial intelligence instead of human voice when connecting to call center for insurance-related service starting March through Watson, IBM’s cognitive computer system, having mastered the conversational skill in the Korean language.

According to the insurance industry on Monday, SK Holdings C&C Co., IBM Watson service operator in Korea under strategic partnership with the U.S. tech giant, was picked as the preferred candidate to run an AI call center business ordered by a foreign insurance company that has recently launched a Korean operation. They are expected to sign the deal within January next year and launch Watson-based call center around March. “It will be the first AI-based call center in the Korean insurance industry,” said an unnamed source from the industry.

It will also be the first case for Watson to communicate in Korean. An official from SK Holdings, a merged entity of SK Group’s holding company SK Holdings and IT service unit SK C&C, said that IBM and SK Holdings C&C has recently completed development of a Korean application program interface (API) of Watson since they started developing the Korean learning program in May. “Watson now shows 96 percent perfection in recognizing and speaking Korean, which allows it to have natural conversations with Koreans,” said Lee Gi-yeol, head of IT service unit of SK Holdings C&C. SK Holdings C&C has been developing another business models based on its IBM Watson AI service named Aibril.

Watson will first assist call center operators and gradually replace operators after having enough data through a machine learning process. Watson will first operate as a chatting robot answering questions of customers in the insurance company’s website.

The IT industry believes that Watson could replace 30 percent of call center operators by the end of 2017 after finishing the machine learning process, and completely command their jobs by 2020. It would bring a huge change in the local call center market encompassing the mobile communication and financial industries.

By Oh Chan-jong

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