Sam's Club at Walmart is helping works and customers through voice and text-based assistants. Find out what Walmart engineers are doing with technical working details, details of advantages of Rasa plus custom improvements made to Rasa, along with challenges faces in text classificiation and entity extraction issues. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN The Conversational AI helping to solve in the area of the retail facility workers Overview of the voice-based personal assistants with in-depth technical working details Advantages of using Rasa along with the various number of improvements made on Rasa to customize based on the need The Challenges resolved in the Text classification and entity extraction issues while implementing various entities. Praneeth Gubbala works as an NLP Engineer at Sam's Club Technology (Walmart) developing chatbots and digital assistants that power one of the largest companies in the world. Praneeth previously worked with the Samsung Bixby NLU team for three years in the conversational AI field.

1. Sam’s Club Conversational AI
Praneeth Gubbala
NLP Engineer, Sam's Club at Walmart
Rasa Developer Summit - 2019

2. Rasa Developer Summit
September, 2019
Sam’s Club Confidential
Praneeth Gubbala
NLP Applied Scientist
Walmart Inc.

3. “What is the phone
number for the Sam’s
Club in Concord?”
“Do we have chicken bites in
stock?”
“Who is working the
bakery tomorrow?”
Sam’s Club’s 90K club associates need thousands of answers every day to
run our $60 billion business
“How many rotisserie chickens
do I need to make right now?”
“Where is the popcorn oil
located?”
“Who called in sick
today?”
“What is the item number
for avocado salsa?” “Are we open on
Thanksgiving?”
“When is Maria
coming to work in
tonight?”
“How do I cut a ribeye
steak?”
“What were my club
sales yesterday?”
“Print a price sign for
plumcots”
“Do we carry Diet Dr.
Pepper?”

4. Sam’s Club Confidential3
Kevin Malone
Robert Vance
Robert California
Gabriel Lewis
David Wallace
“Ask Sam” makes getting answers is as easy as asking a question

5. Sam’s Club Confidential4
“Ask Sam” makes getting answers is as easy as asking a question

6. Sam’s Club Confidential5
“Ask Sam” has been a game changer for Sam’s Club
4M
questions
answered
94%
repeat usage
weekly

7. Developer Console Interface to Label the utterances Intent
and entities in it
Sam’s Club Confidential 6

8. Developer Console has built-in 26 entities and training
manager
Sam’s Club Confidential 7

9. Models training: Developer Console Training Manager
Sam’s Club Confidential 8

10. Serving Models : Ensemble of Machine Learning Models
Sam’s Club Confidential 9
IC
Model 1
IC
Model 2
IC
Ensemble
Model

11. Active Learning: selects informative training data from logs
Sam’s Club Confidential 10
.11
.13
.14
.19
Score Label

12. Future Plans
Sam’s Club Confidential 11
• Question and Answering
• Complex query understanding
• Deep personalization to users
• Seamless (dynamic) context switching.

13. Thank you! Questions?
Sam’s Club Confidential12