AI – abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence: the study of how to make computers that have some of the qualities of the human mind, for example the ability to understand language, recognise pictures, solve problems, and learn.
How many of us these days ask an AI for help during every day tasks? How many of us have accepted Siri, Alexa, Google Home into our families? How has the dulcet tones of these AI personal assistants already become an additional accepted voice in our family homes?
Virtually Smart Ltd have already started to explore how the changing face of technology can not only change our lives, but also our businesses. In this next series of blogs Virtually Smart Ltd are going to investigate the AI personal assistant phenomenon & how the AI technology has already changed the face of our homes & businesses & what the future holds for these technologies.
“Siri, where can I find a Thai restaurant near my home?” “Alexa, play my favourite running compilation” Google, how do I …? where do I? how can I?”
Is the keyboard dead? Have we forgotten that it was not so long ago that to be able to search for information we actually had to type a question in to our search engine of choice? Dependant on your age, if you needed to search for information you had to read, to call another human & ask a question, to use an index card system. To some, these are an archaic system, clumsy & flawed. Yet, it has only been in the past 27 years that we have had internet capabilities, with the first global personal internet being launched in 1991. From it’s early days of limited search capacity, it took until the inception of Google in 1998 to transform how we are able to access global information.
‘From the garage to the Googleplex. The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around. By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.
Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew). The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” https://www.google.com ‘
Having seen the capacity for the internet explode over the past few years, we now have the next generation of search capacity: AI personal assistants. Some of the AI’s which are on the market have more basic search capacity than others.
Siri
‘Siri is an easier, faster way to get things done. It’s on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and HomePod — optimised for each Apple device and ready to help throughout your day. And Siri is always learning. So the more you use it, the more helpful it can be.’ www.apple.com
Alexa
‘Amazon Echo connects to Alexa-a cloud-based voice service-to play music, make calls, set alarms and timers, ask questions, check your calendar, weather, traffic and sports scores, manage to-do and shopping lists, control compatible smart home devices, and more.’ www.amazon.co.uk
Google Home
‘Hands-free help around the house. Google Home Mini is a smart speaker with the Google Assistant built in. So, whenever you need help, it’s by your side’ www.store.google.com
Each personal AI assistant has different parameters & recent research undertaken by Jefferson Graham, Usa Today had the following fascinating results based on their 150 questions posed to Siri, Alexa & Google Home.
“We spent the weekend asking the same 150 questions to the Google Assistant on Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa via the Echo speaker and Apple’s Siri on the iPhone. Google answered correctly 80% of the time, compared to 78% for Amazon and 55% correct for Siri.
A quick caveat for our methodology—if Google and Amazon gave us a complete, audio answer to the question, that counted as a successful response. When an assistant said it wasn’t set up to respond, or didn’t know, that counted as a fail. And when Siri responded with a “Here’s what I found on the Web,” and a link to look it up ourselves, that also counted as a non-answer. ‘
Although the internet & search engines such as Google have transformed the way we access information, the onslaught of AI’s in people’s lives is having another affect.
Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel recently wrote a paper for the World Economic Forum asking the following probing questions:
“Every day, I put my life in the hands of hundreds of people I will probably never meet. The men and women who designed and manufactured my car. Those who prepared my shop-bought lunch, and installed the power sockets in my office. There are countless more.
So what will it take for you to trust artificial intelligence? To allow it to drive your car? To monitor your child? To analyse your brain scan and direct surgical instruments to extract your tumour? To spy on a concert crowd and zero in on the perpetrator of a robbery five years ago?” www.weforum.org
Dr Finkel has a very valid point. We have welcomed AI into our homes, businesses & into our families, but, how far are we prepared to let AI’s be a part of our every day livfe & will some of us be able to get beyond the innate trust issues we have as human beings? For example, would you leave your child in the metaphorical hands of an AI? Would you feel wholly trusting that the AI could care & nurture your child safely & know what to do in an emergency?
Therefore, looking at the evidence above & taking into account the amount of AI personal assistant programmes available, we have to ask, are they a fad? Will there be a flaw? Or will the scientific projections be fulfilled. I Robot by Isaac Asimov was a 1950 science fiction fantasy about a world where robots were a natural part of every ones lives. It makes you wonder if he had some visionary insight into what the future could hold, or was this novel born of a fear of humans losing their ability to be independent & have a reliance on automaton’s?
Next week, Virtually Smart Ltd will be investigating the affect AI is having on businesses & how some are already using this powerful technology to stay one step ahead of the game.
