Say hi to Ailira, everyone, aka “Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Resource Assistant.” She’s here to help with all your tax research needs. Well, in Australia, anyway:
Ailira, or “Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Resource Assistant” is so clever at tax that her creator believes she could help prompt the end of human tax agents. And within two months, she will answer questions in other areas of Australian law.
Ailira is the brainchild of Adelaide-based tax lawyer Adrian Cartland. The story goes that with no professional tax background, his girlfriend Sarah, a speech pathology student, scored 73 per cent on a first-year university tax exam with just 30 minutes’ training and Ailira at her side.
“Your tax agents will probably be gone within five years,” said a confident Mr Cartland.
Gauntlet. Thrown. Also, please gaze upon this photo of Adrian Cartland looking smug about his creation. I don’t blame him! It sounds pretty useful.
Ailira is especially interesting because, although she functions like a search engine, you can ask her questions like you ask your know-it-all colleague.
“The one thing we had difficulty with is that people are so used to doing keyword searches that they struggle to ask a question as you would to another human.
“So we did some upgrades of Ailira’s interface to encourage people to treat Ailira like a human, more in plain English.”
Right, except that “plain English” when asking questions about taxes isn’t really English.
But no matter, the key thing about artificial intelligence for tax research is that it’ll never get tired of answering your boring questions. Even your smartypants colleague will eventually want to go home.
[The Australian via TaxProf]
Image: iStock/pichet_w
