Conversational AI company Front AI to launch a training academy for bot whisperers

Press release 30.4.2019

Front AI, a Conversational AI company focusing on automating customer service contacts, has launched an Artificial Intelligence academy. The academy trains bot whisperers, who teach chatbots to interact with humans in a natural, smart and comprehensive way. The objective is to train 100 natural language specialists (Natural Language Processing, NLP) in Finland by the end of 2019. The bot whisperers will be able to facilitate chatbot and other NLP implementations across different industries.

– There will be many job vacancies within applied AI in the near future. There are already some bot whisperers working in Finnish organisations. These self-learned and often over-loaded people are usually recruited within an organisation. There will be an increasing demand for bot whisperers as chatbot services become more and more common. The sooner the organisations are able to employ industry-trained bot whisperers in their teams, the more successful the implementations will be, told Jari Annala, one of the founders of Front AI.

– Today the questions that chatbots receive from customers are quite general, but as chatbots go deeper into business, they must be able to converse also around industry-specific topics. Artificial Intelligence may offer an interesting new career. Applied AI can be combined with different personal areas of expertise, such as medical, health, language, business, technical, administrative or law, and why not in traditional programming, continued Jari.

Front AI Academy is searching for students in their final year or recently graduated from different fields. The submission criteria include good grades in the Finnish Matriculation Examination, good language skills in mother tongue (Finnish, Swedish or Danish), advanced math and interest in learning new skills. In addition, it is required that students have passed the free Elements of AI course, offered by Reaktor and University of Helsinki. The training does not require programming skills or special mathematical skills. The most important qualities are precision, logical thinking and language perception skills.

A bot whisperer is a future profession, where a trainer using his or her own mother tongue teaches chatbots to understand natural language used by humans and defines question-answer pairs and dialogue structures. A bot whisperer also analyses customer service requests and uses these to train chatbots to better interpret people. The 2nd generation AI-based chatbots are already able to reply to detailed and industry-specific routine questions and they become better all the time.

The duration of the Front AI Academy basic course is two weeks. The multiform course includes self-study, remote training and contact teaching. After successfully completing the course the graduate is a certified AI Trainer and masters the basics of NLP. The course is free of charge for participants. The graduates can find job opportunities within Front AI customer projects or in other AI companies. The application opens in May and the first training starts before summer. The objective is to train 100 bot whisperers to Finland by the end of year.

More information about the course and the submission process (in Finnish)

Contacts
Jari Annala, Partner & CEO – Front AI, +358 400 338 585 jari.annala@front.ai

About Front AI
Front AI is leading company specialising in AI based Service Bots, which understand natural language and automate the routine contacts in customer service. We help our customers to provide automated 24/7 service for their clients. We focus on providing services in the Nordic countries. Our HQ is located in Helsinki, Finland.