We’ve all talked to annoying robot voices on the phone in lieu of actual customer service people. But NTT Communications today says it is creating a service via artificial intelligence for “highly natural automated dialogue.” NTT Communications is a branch of NTT Group, which offers cloud services to enterprise customers.

At VMworld in San Francisco in September, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, said artificial intelligence (AI) will characterize the next major wave of IT innovation, and he described it as “software-defined anywhere, where software is writing software.”

NTT is working with IPsoft’s automated cognitive agent, named “Amelia,” along with language processing technology that NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories have been developing for about four decades. The service will use AI to interact with customers in both English and Japanese and learn from experiences to improve its own quality of service.

The cloud-based AI service will supposedly eliminate the need to constantly respond to prompts such as: "If this is correct, please press 1." And the service will be able to initiate actions for the customer such as issuing invoices, sending emails, or mailing documents.

Prior to launching a commercial service in the summer of 2016, NTT will invite enterprises to participate in proof of concept (PoC) testing starting in February 2016.

In other NTT news, its subsidiary NTT America has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for HPE customers in the United States to buy NTT’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) products, including enterprise private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, plus NTT America professional services, including cloud migration, data center consolidation, managed infrastructure, and disaster recovery.

The cloud services are powered by HPE technology and delivered over managed IT infrastructure owned and operated by NTT, including secure network coverage (VPN) in 196 countries; a high-capacity Tier 1 IP network; 140 worldwide data centers; and an enterprise-grade cloud footprint in 14 global markets.

Last week, HPE announced that Microsoft Azure would become the preferred public cloud for HPE customers.