The AI platform of the CST group became the basis for the creation of virtual assistants of Russian Railways

2023: Creating Virtual Assistants

On March 14, 2023, the Speech Technology Center Group provided Russian Railways with an artificial intelligence-based platform for creating text and voice robots. The platform allows the Russian Railways team and its partners to independently develop the necessary scenarios in chat bots, continuously improving services. The purpose of the implementation is to automate processes, delegate the routine workload of specialists, and free up human resources to solve more complex, creative problems. The project will be one of the large-scale implementations of virtual assistants for railway companies - the technological capabilities of the CST platform make it possible to scale solutions, optimizing communications for more than 700,000 employees in the future.

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  AI the CST group became the basis for the creation of virtual assistants of Russian Railways

According to the company, on the CST platform, using the ChatNavigator solution, ViCo has already been created - a virtual assistant that optimized the work of the Main Computing Center (GVC) of Russian Railways.

Employees of the Russian Railways Holding Company work in dozens of information systems, technical support of which is provided by the GVC. In proportion to the number of users and information systems, the load on the GVC increased, the waiting time for the response of consultants increased, the efficiency of business processes decreased.

The task of the virtual assistant is to facilitate the work and optimize the efficiency of Russian Railways employees, as well as reduce the burden on GVC technologists who process user requests by automating routine processes. "ViCo" coped with this task. A month after the commissioning of the virtual assistant, users were able to get an answer on the work of one of the 94 information systems of the holding within more than 300 scenarios. In the first month of operation alone, ViCo managed to process 34,631 requests, in 85% of cases successfully solving the problem. Each request allows the assistant to train and continuously develop as a full-fledged assistant in the workplace. told Dmitry Smolyarov, Deputy Director of the Main Computing Center of Russian Railways

The scale and multi-level architecture of Russian Railways required special technological solutions. The standard approach "chatbot inside the information system" was not applicable - there are about a hundred such systems, some of them are interconnected, while each user has a personal set of access, and employees with a different level of access can be at one workplace in shifts.

Especially for Russian Railways, CST experts have developed and implemented a master bot solution. This allowed distributed teams of more than 200 people to participate in the development of scenarios for the virtual assistant, divide scripts between teams, and also build complex integration scenarios taking into account access levels. This is one of the first projects of this scale for railway companies, supporting the global trend of digitalization using AI tools. Its peculiarity is in scale, technological exclusivity, and most importantly - in optimization of external communications that have not already become the standard, but in other approaches to optimizing internal processes. Results - 85% of the solution of issues by the virtual assistant "ViCo" already at the start of the project demonstrate that this approach optimizes business, contributes to development. told Dmitry Dyrmovsky, CEO of the CST group of companies

At the first stage of development, the dialog assistant was filled with data from the databases of the Unified User Support Service. Then, in test mode, ViCo worked with a real user in real time. Thus, by the time it was put into commercial operation, the virtual assistant was already trained in live communication, which allowed ViCo to successfully answer questions from a wide range of Russian Railways employees from the first day of work without the help of GVC technologists.

Now on the desktops of Russian Railways employees there is a "ViCo" shortcut, when you click on which the information system window opens in the browser. It automatically identifies the user. After verification, the user immediately sees what corporate information resources he has access to and, accordingly, on which he can get advice.

In the future, ViCo will be integrated with the Express corporate messenger, which will allow you to work with a consultant not only at a stationary workplace, but also outside the office, using a smartphone. Another promising area of ​ ​ development is the introduction of a voice recognition system, which will make it possible to create voice assistants and expand communication channels with a virtual consultant through the internal telephony of Russian Railways.