The future of robotics in producer services

The use of ‘real’ robots in producer services in Australia is in its very early stages and is following the trends of other countries towards providing customer services by embodied technologies. For example, Japan’s Bank of Tokyo is using Aldebaran’s Nao robots as customer service agents. The robots are equipped with a camera and microphone, use visual and speech recognition, can respond to 19 spoken languages, interact and communicate with customers, and provide structured responses to queries. Australia’s Commonwealth Bank is looking at introducing similar methods, and have been trialling customer reactions to the Chip robot (see Case Study).