At Zendesk we are developing a series of machine learning products, the most recent of which is Automatic Answers. It uses machine learning to interpret user questions and responds with relevant knowledge base articles. When a customer has a question, complaint or enquiry, they may submit their request online. Once their request is received, Automatic Answers will analyse the request and suggest relevant articles which may best assist with the customer's request via email. Automatic answers uses a class of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms known as deep learning to identify relevant articles.

This is computer-generated wordplay and an example of how the boundaries of artificial intelligence are shifting. If a computer can crack jokes, what other human activities could they start to replicate? What jobs could it take? Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly big issue for education - not least because many tech companies and publishers are circling around the huge commercial opportunities. But could students really get their answers from a robot rather than a teacher?

According to a new release, "Zendesk, Inc. today announced the launch of Automatic Answers, a feature powered by machine learning within Zendesk that helps customers solve their inquiries faster and enables businesses to have more efficient support teams. Zendesk is one of the first customer service platforms implementing machine learning to natively auto-respond to customer tickets with relevant knowledge base articles, helping solve and deflect customer inquiries before they ever reach an agent. Automatic Answers was developed in Australia by Zendesk's Melbourne-based development team, who previously brought Satisfaction Prediction to market and was awarded the 2016 Victorian iAward for Big Data Innovation of the Year."

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).