Kian, the AI-Powered Bot, Is Here to Tell You All about Kias

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Would you want to glean information from an artificially intelligent bot online as you mull your next car purchase? Apparently, plenty of people have done so: Kia said its NiroBot has helped broker the sales of more than 22,000 Niro crossovers. So successful is this Niro-specific bot that Kia has launched a brand-wide AI-powered shopping assistant named Kian.

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Kian lives on Facebook Messenger, where it can be asked about things such as the fuel economy of the Sorento or the price of the Optima. The AI bot soon will also be on the company’s website. If you don’t like Kian, the bot can quickly link you to Kia’s Consumer Affairs division or to a live human representative. The human may not have the same wealth of immediately available data as Kian does, however. “Kian provides a mobile-first shopping experience that feels like a conversation with a human automotive expert, only smarter, because it instantly analyzes millions of vehicle data points, aggregated and organized in a data stack, that acts as Kian’s brain,” Kia said in a release.

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We asked Kian several questions, and its answers appear below:

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It didn’t always give us a straight answer, though:

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But Kian has been programmed to get smarter. “As more shoppers use the system, it learns to anticipate questions, provides more specific answers, and gets smarter over time,” according to Martin Schmitt, CEO of CarLabs, which helped develop Kian.

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Automakers are putting machine learning to use in several ways. Last year, General Motors teamed up with IBM to launch OnStar Go, which uses AI to learn driver preferences and then applies that knowledge to creating a tailored in-car experience. Ford has a team dedicated to exploring the use of AI and robotics for a broad range of transportation projects, with a particular focus on self-driving vehicles. And some dealers have been toying with AI along the same lines as Kia’s Kian, deploying 24/7 online support that does not have to be staffed by a human.

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• Ford Accelerates Robotics and Artificial-Intelligence Development
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• GM’s OnStar Go and IBM’s Watson Team Up to Study Your Habits
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• Artificial-Intelligence Developers: We’re Thinking beyond Autonomous Cars
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Having said all that, we’re happy to report that if Elon Musk’s fears that AI will run amok come to fruition and the growing prevalence of AI leads to computers and machines turning against humans, the revolt is unlikely to be led by Kian, which seems sufficiently aloof to its own existence.

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