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　(Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Osamu Hata; hereafter "WAP") announced today that Kobe Steel, Ltd. has introduced HUE Chatbot, an AI chatbot based on natural language processing technology, and will begin full-scale operation in April 2023. The new chatbot will be fully operational from April 2023. This will enable Kobe Steel to automate the handling of internal inquiries from its approximately 10,000 employees.

Trial use of the system was highly acclaimed. Trial introduction in November showed immediate results.

　Kobe Steel began preparing to use the HUE Chatbot at the end of September 2022, and in November of the same year began trial use in the administrative department for employees. With a registered vocabulary of 2.9 million words (as of May 2021), one of the largest in Japan, the "HUE Chatbot" can be used immediately with little burden to introduce. Within three weeks of trial use, the chatbot received more than 1,000 inquiries, contributing to the reduction of man-hours required to answer by phone or e-mail.

　HUE Chatbot" can be maintained directly from the administration screen with no programming. If the AI-derived candidate answers are not correct, the administrator can intuitively drag-and-drop the correct ones from the existing answers to "adjust the candidate answers" or "register keywords" to reduce maintenance time.

When the AI-derived answer candidates are incorrect, allows users to intuitively specify the correct answer by dragging and dropping the correct one from the existing answers.

This is a useful feature that prevents the flood of similar FAQs.

2. AI technology reduces the number of registered questions from 70 to 2, replacing a competitor's system

Kobe Steel had been using chatbots for some time, but decided to replace them with the AI-powered "HUE Chatbot" due to cost advantages and ease of maintenance. HUE Chatbot" is an AI-powered chatbot that can be used in a variety of scenarios.

　The "HUE Chatbot" can create any type of FAQ, including scenario-based and one-question-and-one-answer type, and can respond to spelling errors by using natural language processing technology. For example, "I want to use zoom, but what settings do I need to make?" or "I want to check how to use zoom for meetings.

By being able to handle such shaky notation, "HUE

Chatbot
" was able to reduce the number of similar FAQs from about 70 before the replacement to 2 in some cases.3.

HUE Chatbot" newly added a document search function in April. This eliminates the need to prepare FAQs, and is expected to significantly improve operational efficiency. Kobe Steel plans to use this function to further improve the efficiency of its inquiry operations.

Image of the document search function

[About HUE Chatbot and the "fluctuation" of notation]

HUE Chat
bot is an AI chatbot that applies NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology to deal with "fluctuation" of the Japanese language. It uses Sudachi, a Japanese morphological analyzer, which is the largest in Japan with 2.9 million words registered (as of January 2023). This makes it possible to understand differences in character types such as "sunflower", "acceptance", "simulation", and "Kitaca" as having the same meaning. It is possible to understand the same meaning and realize a smooth dialogue as if you were talking to a person.