Automation Anywhere Inc. today debuted AARI, a digital assistant that will enable workers to interact with the robotic process automation bots used by their company and give them instructions.

AARI was announced during Automation Anywhere’s virtual Innovation Day event. 

Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a fast-growing category of software products designed to streamline manual back-office tasks such as data entry. Automation Anywhere is one of the leading players in the segment. It received a $6.8 billion valuation last November after raising a $290 million round led by Salesforce Ventures. 

Automation Anywhere’s RPA platform works by observing how employees perform a given task inside a business application and capturing their workflow. Then, the platform turns the workflow into a bot, a software agent that can perform the same task without any human input. Employees are thereby freed up to focus on more important work, while the chore that was automated can be performed more efficiently and with a lower risk of errors.

AARI, the digital assistant announced today, takes the concept a step further. Companies now can create bots not only to automate repetitive manual tasks but also to give their employees the ability to interact with those bots and harness them to make their own work easier.

A video on Automation Anywhere’s website provides an overview of some of the ways AARI can be used. An employee could ask a bot if they have any urgent emails and receive a natural-language response detailing the number of time-sensitive messages in their inbox, as well as how soon they require a reply. Workers can also ask bots to perform more complex tasks, such as sending an invoice to the accounting department for approval or verifying a customer’s postal address.

On launch, AARI includes a text-based “bot-to-human” interface for interacting with bots. Automation Anywhere plans to add a voice interface in the future to provide a user experience similar to that offered by consumer digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri. 

“AARI completes our vision to ‘automate automations’ by creating a digital assistant for the new era of work – enabling anyone to automate from anywhere at any time with a simple interface that can manage automations,” said Automation Anywhere co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mihir Shukla (pictured). 

AARI is available as part of the latest Enterprise A2019 release of the company’s RPA platform. Pricing starts at $35 per user per month.  

Photo: SiliconANGLE