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Like a spoonful of mustard or mayonnaise – or perhaps you prefer sriracha?
– it seems no software recipe is complete these days without a dollop of generative AI.
H&R Block’s new AI-powered chatbot will help answer your thorny tax questions
And now it can help you with lifes most vexing challenge: taxes.
Is this a personal expense or a business one?
How many roads must a man walk down, before travel is officially part of his job?
We see AI as one of the defining technologies of our time.
(Bird was virtual at the event, a result of possible exposure to Covid.)
Its really a best practices implementation in terms of responsible AI, she said.
But if youre hesitant to even ask AI for tax advice, you have good reason.
Some experts worry that problem may never be solved.
Its inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases.
One answer to the problem is starting with the right training data.
Theyre making changes well into December and January, well into the tax season.
Were making sure you get all that information.
Can I deduct a car as a business expense?
And crucial to the entire experience: Live, human beings – CPAs even!
– are always just a click away.
When we are not absolutely sure?
Give a response that we are actually confident in, Thadani said.
Privacy matters: Who will see your data?
Should a company be allowed to train an LLM on your data?
Were sitting on a lot of really personal, private information, Thadani admitted.
So the assistant wont remember you.
It wont ingest your tax forms to answer the questions you pose.
And by design, other people wont benefit from your questions down the road.
The new offering also taps into one of the quirks of our modern software assistants.
We dont necessarily talk to them like adults.
Weve been trained to ask Alexa or theGoogleAssistant halting half-words and phrases.
Meanwhile, chatbots can converse in natural language.
H&R Blocks tool works fine in either space, Bird explained.
Its incredibly enabling because it allows people to speak in words theyre comfortable with, she said.
Now if it could only help us deduct a few holiday pounds from the waistline.
