Utilities supplying electricity in urban areas tend to get inundated by customer complaints of power outage, low voltage and other issues during summers and monsoon. Telephone helplines manned by humans tend to be inaccessible as small groups of workers who man the helplines cannot respond to the flood of calls. The state-run Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company (Bescom), which supplies power to eight districts in Karnataka, has now turned to an artificial intelligence-powered system to service the over 9,000 complaints it receives on its helpline systems each day. Bescom is tying up with the Medical Intelligence and Language Engineering (or MILE) Lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to create an AI-based complaint response system than can cater to as many as 500 calls at a time -- much higher than the 60 under the system that the utility employs at present. "What we will have is a technology where when someone calls in the machine will take over and the machine will recognise whatever the speaker says whether it is in Kannada or English. It will understand the complaint -- whether it is with regard to a bill or power outage or concession for solar energy -- and find an answer from the server. It will then synthesise the answer again to text and convert to speech," said A G Ramakrishnan, the head of IISc's MILE.