Meet Vera, the Russian robot that is hiring humans
Last year, a McKinsey study found that automation would take '800 million jobs by 2030'. Fast-forward to today, Robots have found yet another job. Meet Vera, an artificial intelligence software created by a Russian start-up Stafory. Robot Vera is designed to recruit humans and help fill vacant jobs for the company's 300-odd clients including PepsiCo, Ikea and Loréal. Here's how.
How has Vera been developed?
Programmers have trained the software with about 13 billion examples of syntax and speech from TV, Wikipedia, and job listings to develop Vera's vocabulary and help it speak more naturally while also expanding its understanding of responses. Vera, which integrates speech recognition technologies from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Russia's Yandex, is now being taught how to recognize emotions such as anger, pleasure and disappointment.
Origin of Vera
Back in 2016, co-founders Vladimir Sveshnikov and Alexander Uraksin, were calling up hundreds of candidates who had lost interest in their current jobs or couldn't be located. Uraksin says, "We felt like robots ourselves, so we figured it was better to automate the task."
What can Vera do?
Vera has been trained to shortlist resumes from different job sites and narrow the field to 10 percent candidates by interviewing hundreds of applicants simultaneously via video or voice calls. According to Stafory, Vera helps to quickly scrutinize candidates for high-turnover service and blue-collar positions such as clerks, waiters, construction workers, and thus reduce the time and cost of recruitment by a third.
Vera is already serving multinational companies
Vera, the AI-powered robot, started working in Russia in December 2016. Since then, a lot of employers have turned to it to recruit candidates. In two years' time, Stafory has added clients in the Middle East and done projects in Europe and the US and served 300-odd clients including PepsiCo and Ikea. Notably, the company says its revenue 'will top $1 million this year'.
