CTBC Bank (中國信託銀行) and National Taiwan University (NTU) on Monday signed a NT$10 million (US$328,926) deal to utilize the school’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to enhance the firm’s consumer banking services.
The bank is to provide anonymized data to NTU’s AI Research Center and the IoX Center — which focuses on Internet of Things — for research on natural-language understanding, emotion recognition and microexpression reading, CTBC said.
The research on emotion recognition and microexpression reading could help bank staff read a client’s feelings or emotional state to provide better services, CTBC president James Chen (陳佳文) told a news conference in Taipei.
For example, when a camera-based recognition software finds that a client is feeling impatient, it would remind bank staff to greet the client quickly, Chen said.
Analysis of microexpressions could help companies capture more nonverbal information about applicants during job interviews, he added.
CTBC hopes its cooperation with the university would provide a new language-understanding solution, chief technology officer Titan Chia (賈景光) said.
“We utilized language understanding to improve our consumer support service last year and found it helpful,” Chia said.
CTBC, which receives more than 100,000 telephone calls from clients every month, has assigned a team to listen to phone records to check if employees managed to solve clients’ problems or properly market its products, he said.
“We could not manually finish reviewing all phone records and had to work overtime, but last year, we had AI screen those files first, so our employees only had to listen to records that were controversial,” Chia said.
“AI does not steal jobs from humans. Instead, new job opportunities emerge as we need people to train the machines to learn which marketing terms are appropriate,” he said.
The bank plans to utilize the new technology in its lending business, to combat money laundering and for “know-your-customer” compliance, he said.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle