Tokio Marine Life Insurance debuts chatbot which understands Singlish

Tokio Marine Life Insurance Singapore (TMLS) has launched an AI chatbot in Singapore, in a bid to simplify life insurance and make it more accessible to the public. The chatbot’s name is TOMI and stands for Tokio Marine Insurance. It was built in collaboration with local AI startup Pand.ai.According to the statement, the technology behind TOMI is called Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (Deep NLP). The technology is able to interpret sentences regardless of length and grammatical accuracy, compared to the traditional NLP approach which only interprets short phrases and sentences.This capability allows TOMI to understand grammatically inaccurate sentences, and even Singlish."This sets TOMI apart from many other chatbots, which rely primarily on keyword recognition or require grammatical accuracy from users,” the statement added.The chatbot builds on the success of an earlier version released in January, which was launched for its financial advisers. The current version is targeted towards users to increase understanding and enable users to manage their insurance coverage more independently.This is through the provision of users with instant and accurate explanations of commonly-used terms in insurance, information on TMLS products and solutions. The chatbot also looks to serve as a potential touch point for those looking to join the industry as a financial adviser with TMLS.The move will also be supported by regional headquarters Tokio Marine Asia (TMA), which will be exploring the potential extension of TOMI and its functionalities to other regional markets in Asia.“Conversations play an important role in how a customer buys and consumes life insurance products. As customers’ behaviour shift towards digital, we see intelligent AI-powered chatbots as a natural evolution of websites and mobile apps, and will eventually become a dominant digital channel in how a customer interacts with an insurer,” James Tan, CEO of TMLS, said.Marketing has reached out to TMLS for additional comment.