Automation and Transparency across Financial and Legal services: Mitigating Risk, Enhancing Efficiency and Promoting Customer Retention through the Application of Voice and Emotional AI

"Insurance fraud costed the UK £3B in 2017, increasing 8% since 2015, equating to £10,400 per fraudulent claim. This causes an increase of £50 per policy. Current manual processes to identify illegitimate claims are repetitive, time-consuming, inefficient, non-user friendly with no consideration for vulnerable customers. This presents fraud identification as a primary target for developed AI capabilities.

The public are becoming increasingly aware of voice activated AI following the release of Amazon's Echo: a market leader in the 'voice-controlled home'. Resultant scientific research surrounding this is focusing on adding intelligence to spoken commands for real-time information.

Current advanced emotional AI technologies capture (non-verbal) human expressions via computer vision, voice analysis and/or biometric sensors. These lack processing speed and are unable to understand both vocalics and linguistics. No solution currently combines artificial intelligence and voice technology for a true conversation with full explainability of its decision.

Addressing this gap, Intelligent Voice aim to develop an AI software that detects and interprets emotion and linguistics from voice. In collaboration with behavioural analysis experts at Strenuus and deep neural networks academics at University of East London, this project aims to develop a vocal AI technology for credibility/vulnerability assessment, key word spotting, in-call behavioural guidance and transparency of the decision-making process, trialled by an insurance contact centre during live claims handling. This will offer a breakthrough technology for the anti-fraud sector, simultaneously providing unique expertise to the UK in deep neural networks and AI with cross-sector potential.

All partners are well placed to exploit this opportunity: Intelligent Voice have an existing global client-base for their voice recognition/transcription software in the financial/insurance services market, Strenuus completed Proof-of-Concept studies with their linguistic algorithms to assess credibility, successfully identifying deception, UEL has demonstrable expertise in data analytics, machine learning architecture and AI explainability. Insurance software providers are in place as in-kind contributors for exploitation.

With InnovateUK support, a 30-month programme of Industrial Research and Experimental Development is required to develop behavioural analysis algorithms, explain the neural networks of the system, integrate the solution to ICE's existing platform and trial the technology in a controlled environment. Project success will support commercialisation by 2021, to establish:

- Intelligent Voice at the forefront of the speech recognition software market, poised for significant growth;

- Strenuus as a leader in behavioural analysis with novel audio processing algorithms;

- UEL as a UK leading university with state-of-the-art explaining of DNNs."