The benefits of an email-based AI virtual assistant on AWS

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, companies are constantly seeking ways to enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and provide top-notch customer service. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool to help companies achieve these goals while revolutionizing the way they interact with customers. In this post, you can read about the transformative potential of email-based virtual assistants—a standout among AI applications—powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Setting itself apart from traditional AI-driven bots or virtual assistants, an email-based virtual assistant introduces distinctive features primarily rooted in its chosen medium of communication—emails. Unlike conventional bots, this virtual assistant functions within the realm of email, providing users with a seamless and familiar platform for interaction.

Maintaining data security in AI interactions

As virtual assistants handle sensitive customer information, maintaining robust data security is important to address user concerns. Users seek assurance regarding the safety of their data, particularly when interacting with AI systems that process submitted files. To address this, you should address these key data security measures:

1. Virtual assistants should facilitate interactions exclusively through secure communication channels. This prevents direct exposure of servers to the internet, enhancing overall security.

2. Implement permissions that restrict interactions to designated users only. This makes sure that the virtual assistant operates within predefined boundaries, adding an extra layer of security.

3. After the virtual assistant completes its analysis of submitted files, they should be promptly deleted. No remnants of user data should persist.

4. Establish role-based access controls to verify that only authorized personnel can access virtual assistant dashboards and associated data. This measure enhances overall security by limiting access to those with the appropriate permissions.

5. Implement activity logging to create an audit trail. This can be invaluable in case investigations are required, providing transparency and accountability.

6. Employ encrypted data transfer mechanisms to safeguard information as it moves between the user and the virtual assistant. This makes sure that data remains confidential during transit.

By incorporating these measures, including encrypted data transfer, temporary storage, automated file deletion, and access controls, companies can establish and maintain high standards of data security, thereby instilling trust among their users. 

Utilizing email as a secure medium

The genesis of utilizing email as the primary medium for interacting with AI-driven virtual assistants stems from its exceptional security features. Email proves to be a robust and secure deployment option due to the following inherent advantages:

1. Built-in security features – Email platforms come equipped with built-in security measures such as malware scanning, spam detection, and TLS encryption. These features add an extra layer of protection to the communication channel.

2. Threat restriction – Advanced features like Litmus scanning, link checking, and attachment isolation actively restrict potential threats. This confirms a secure environment for interactions within the email ecosystem.

3. Administrative settings – Admin settings enable the restriction of interactions to specific email domains, preventing communication from anonymous or unverified senders. This contributes to maintaining a trusted and controlled communication environment.

Moreover, the transient nature of email communication makes sure that user data is not permanently stored after processing. Adhering to the best practice of “temporary retention,” an automated deletion script is triggered after each interaction, further enhancing security.

For these compelling reasons, email emerges as a reliable and secure channel for seamless interactions with users. Users can confidently submit confidential data, such as medical reports, for analysis by the virtual assistant, receiving automated and secure summaries by email. This approach underscores the significance of using email’s inherent security features for effective and protected AI-driven interactions. Email emerges as a robust medium to securely deploy virtual assistants, thanks to its inherent security advantages.

Versatility beyond general queries

The true potential of email-based virtual assistants is realized when they expand beyond generic user service queries to tackle more complex documents and data. Modern AI techniques like optical character recognition (OCR), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning (ML) empower assistants to parse text, numbers, tables, labels, and even handwritten notes within documents.

For instance, assistants can generate quick summaries of multipage reports, contracts, and financial statements when the original files may be too lengthy for users to analyze quickly. Tables and graphs demonstrating key parameters and their historical trends can be extracted from papers and emailed to managers on the go.

For hand-annotated documents such as prescriptions and invoices, the assistant can scan and digitize the papers while accurately detecting underlined passages or tagged elements into structured digital records. This allows quick archiving and searching later.

The assistant can even plot address and location datasets on digital maps to visualize distribution. Advanced assistants are versatile enough to process various document types and handle diverse tasks beyond generics.

Solution overview

Shown in figure 1, the design of the virtual assistant, which operates through email interactions, can be structured using AWS services to confirm optimal efficiency, security, and scalability.

Figure 1. Architectural diagram of the solution described in this post. The major components are Amazon WorkMail, AWS Lambda, Amazon Textract, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Location Service, and Amazon Simple Email Service.

1. Customers send attachment-based requests to the assistant’s enterprise email powered by Amazon WorkMail. The email body contains processing directives.

2. The inbound email with attachment triggers the serverless AWS Lambda function, which runs the core business logic.

3. Lambda processes the email body to determine the requested task based on keywords. If the task requires attachments to be processed, extraction begins.

4. The system checks the attachment file type. Text documents are passed through Amazon Textract for text, table, and label extraction. Images are passed through Amazon Rekognition for object and text detection.

5. Based on user intent and file type, the function invokes AWS services such as Amazon Textract, Amazon Rekognition, or Amazon Comprehend to analyze attachments and extract information.

6. Finally, Lambda orchestrates the response email using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), including the output from AWS services, before securely deleting the original attachments.

Use case scenario

Countless use cases can be implemented with an email-based virtual assistant. You can access the code here, covering various scenarios, including:

Knowledge questions – For general inquiries about the company or policies, users can submit their questions by email to the virtual assistant, receiving direct responses through the email interface.

Review summaries – In the case of a multipage compliance report, the virtual assistant processes attachments through Amazon Textract to Amazon Rekognition, summarizing key highlights in a clean document using Amazon Bedrock. These summaries are then emailed back within minutes, saving hours of manual analysis.

Statement digitization – Users needing to digitize manual bank statement entries and reconciliations for archival purposes can submit statement snapshots. Each snapshot is processed through Amazon Textract to detect rows and columns and extract printed text alongside handwritten amounts into .csv format, all accomplished within minutes.

Analyze medical records – Patients can send medical records in PDF format or as handwritten doctor’s notes for emergency second opinions. Amazon Rekognition is utilized to detect and redact any personally identifiable information (PII), while Amazon Comprehend reviews reports to highlight relevant medical history passages. This aids healthcare experts in their analysis. 

Conclusion

Email-based virtual assistants have evolved from basic chatbots to sophisticated AI systems capable of replicating human-like judgment for complex document-based tasks. AWS provides robust platforms to build assistants using Amazon Textract, data extraction, speech-to-text, translation, and other technologies.

As illustrated in this post, virtual assistants can deliver significant time and cost savings alongside user delight when deployed thoughtfully—with data security, accessibility, and industry needs as prime considerations. We are truly at the cusp of the AI assistant revolution. The time is now for businesses to evaluate pilots that could massively impact their productivity and service quality.