Amelia: The Virtual Assistant Empowering U.S. Navy Sailors Onboard and Onshore

The U.S. Navy is developing an AI-powered virtual assistant named Amelia, capable of understanding emotions and providing answers sourced from authorized data and aimed at supporting sailors both at sea and on land.

“We’re excited about the unsupervised learning in Amelia because the benefits and mission outcomes we measure if we partner well -with [General Dynamics Information Technology] and [Amazon Web Services] here- will be compounding, this is part of larger campaign to make [information technology] invisible so our nation’s defenders have more energy to put on mission,” said Justin Fanelli, acting chief technology officer at the Department of the Navy.

As this technology completes testing and preliminary fielding later this year, it will be equipped with the ability to understand humans beyond words.

“[Amelia] is going to be able to pick up on emotional cues, and she's going to be able to understand if somebody is frustrated and be able to escalate that call right away to a human agent,” said Melissa Gatti, service and resource manager, at the Navy’s Program Executive Office Digital.

The virtual assistant will be able to prompt human intervention when needed. Otherwise, it will seek to reply to questions from its data of approved documents and procedures.

“Unlike a chat bot, in which the back end is pretty much scripted, you're going to get the answers that are there—that are pre-populated in that chat and by that chat bot—and if that answer is not there, then you don't have the option to be escalated to a live agent; where Amelia will have that ability to do so,” said Travis Dawson, acting chief technology officer, Navy & Marine Corps Sector at General Dynamics Information Technology.

The virtual assistant will be able to have many conversations, including administrative and career-relevant discussions.

“She's going to be preloaded with knowledge articles that were approved by the government based off of the specific questions that the end users will call in for, … it’s manpower training and education systems—it's not your enterprise IT such as flank speed,” Dawson explained. “It’s MyNavyHR, and those are the types of systems that are supported and those are the types of questions that Amelia will get and have the ability to answer with a pure conversational AI.”

Help for users may currently be limited by personnel answering those questions; the expectation is that this assistant will process many more requests.

“She's able to manage hundreds of queries at once, so you're not waiting for that one person on the phone or doing one query at a time: she's doing multiple things multiple times. That really enhances our power to resolve issues in a much faster time period, but not just for one warfighter,” Gatti told SIGNAL Media in an interview.

In terms of how the knowledge base will develop, it largely depends on the final users.

“She is trained by us, so there's still a human element where we go in and we tell her what she needs to know and we curate, her knowledge based on the issues that come up,” Gatti explained.

The whole project includes users around the world, on land or at sea.

“We do know that there are challenges with the Navy, specifically because of their location: there's bandwidth constraints in the fleet, so we're getting ready to go through some user acceptance tests and acceptance testing within the Navy that will include shipboard communications as well,” Dawson said.

Amelia’s text version will be launched in August and later this year sailors will be able to access it via voice, according to Gatti.