This
discussion goes well deep into what IPA technology is and how it progressing
and how it is affecting consumers daily life, with a tinge of scientific stuff
altogether compiled from various articles, some wiki pages and some other
articles.
MIT
Technology Review has put "intelligent software assistant" as one of
its ten emerging technologies in 2009 TR10 special reports.
An
intelligent software assistant, also called an intelligent software agent,
cognitive assistant or cognitive agent, is software that is also an intelligent
agent which performs a task with minimum specific directions from users. It
evolves from the concept of virtual personal assistant, a cognitive assistant
that learns and organizes. Intelligent software assistant combines
traditionally isolated approaches to artificial intelligence to try to create a
personal-assistant program that improves by interacting with its user by
self-learning. It uses intelligent techniques and behavior studies to impress
the users that a computer could be so "smart". The purpose of
developing intelligent software assistant is to create an incredible experience
that will help people be more efficient in their lives, in solving problems and
the tasks. The examples of what intelligent software assistant could do in
current stage are helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight
status, or plan weekend activities.
An Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA)
is a software agent on mobile devices that integrates user input, localization
capabilities, and access to information from a variety of databases in order to
carry out services for individuals. It carries out data mining and then
classifies it according to the user’s needs. As a software agent, IPAs act on
behalf of their users to complete tasks or provide desired information based on
voice inputs or commands. They can also automatically perform management of
tasks and update information often without user initiation or interaction.
When
managers interact with a given IPA application, in addition to simply having
information provided, IPAs have the unique characteristic of also being able to
complete tasks. With the convenient choice of either typing or speaking a
question or command, IPA's can complete various actions such as keeping track of
appointments, sending e-mails, searching the web, and making a call through
Skype. Aware of the context the individual finds themselves in, IPA are also
able to order a taxi, make restaurant reservations, and provide both weather
and traffic updates. It is clear that since IPAs are not only search engines,
but also as stated on the MIT Technology Review website, a "do
engine." Furthermore, if managers integrate themselves well with
the procedures of using this technology on their smartphones, bridged by the
data, more repetitive tasks will be completed in a shorter amount of time.
Advantages:
- Software is easily accessible
- Allows the automation of many repetitive tasks
- Provides the opportunity to become both more effective and efficient
Disadvantages:
- Spoken queries can often be misinterpreted
Resources and databases accessed by assistants are limited, restricting the quality of IPA services
On comparing Siri and Google, 3 main differences are found that are present between them:
"Google Now doesn't have a pretend personality like Apple's sassy assistant, instead just appearing as a familiar search box. But just like Siri, it can take voice commands related to phone functions such as setting reminders or sending messages, and field requests for information such as "How old is the Eiffel Tower?" and "Where can I find a good Chinese restaurant?""
1. Google Now provides information which users require through searching on Google Search and displays the results on your screen directly without another command. However, in Siri this comes more complex that it needs to take an extra step to complete the task on your Iphone. For example, if you want to do a search, on Google Now the results will comes below your command "card"; while on Siri, if you search something through internet, it won't show you the results directly, instead it will ask you in such sentence " If you like, I will search the web", then results will come outjust after you say yes.
2. Google Now covers a wider range of information which is more comprehensive and accurate than SIRI that it bases on its own searching engine. Google Now is using Google resources that have built in past years. However, as a data-driven device, SIRI cut all resources from Google search engine and rely on other third parties search engine, Siri is at disadvantage apparently in this aspect.
"Also like Siri, Google Now responds with speech. However, rather than passing along queries to third-party services such as Yelp for answers, Google's helper makes use of the company's recently launched Knowledge Graph, a database that categorizes information in useful ways"
3. Google Now can recognize all activity you perform on the phone, and use that to give suggestions to you, remind you to do your business or even plan your daily activity. This is totally different from SIRI which just answers questions and do as you tell.
"Google Now also introduces a new trick. It combines the constant stream of data a smartphone collects on its owner with clues about the person's life that Google can shift from Web searches and e-mails to guess what he or she would ask it for next. This enables Google Now not only to meet a user's needs but also, in some cases, to preempt them. Virtual index cards appear offering information it thinks you need to know at a particular time.
But some people in this smart machine era, concludes that intelligent personal assistants and smart advisors, “will be the most disruptive in the history of IT”. At Artificial Solutions, this is no surprise to us. Our OEM and consumer connected device customers are working on some simply amazing implementations, which could define the word disruptive – and they are made possible by NLI. In the latest version of Teneo, for instance, powerful wizards and auto-coding has made natural language development so simple that users don’t need to be a pointy-headed computational linguist; our own egg-heads have covered the difficult part. This leaves enterprise users able to create contextually aware, intelligent personal assistants and smart advisors that meet their own business requirements, quickly and easily. Gartner notes that consumers will be the driving force of the smart machine era and that this will be further strengthened as enterprises invest in the technology too. The research firm states that one of the reasons behind consumer use is the desire to be more successful. For me, this is similar to the use of social media that was driven into most businesses by savvy users that saw an ability to carry out their work more efficiently and with greater success, long before enterprises saw the advantage.
We already see a similar occurrence with our virtual assistants implemented in an online customer service role. In several large enterprises the call centre staff use the virtual assistant because it finds the answer they are looking for much faster than going through their own internal systems. They can handle a call more quickly, which brings up their average statistics and puts themselves or their team in line for a bonus.
Yahoo was lagging behind in this race but now it is coming up the more powerful IPA. The partnership, called Project InMind, will last five years and give CMU researchers access to Yahoo's trove of data. Yahoo fellows will work to develop and test programs that attempt to understand and anticipate human behavior. Yahoo's agreement will also include the development of "natural language processing," which could allow users to speak with their mobile phones in a similar fashion to Apple's Siri. Yahoo is seeking to meld contextualized search with voice interaction, something Siri does not do. The new partnership comes amid a series of moves by CEO Marissa Mayer to accelerate the development of mobile products that personalize and contextualize user experience based on data. In early 2014, Yahoo acquired mobile personalization start-up Aviate, which attempts to cater a user's home screen to the time of day and location, as well as location-based app Jybe. These efforts seek to take advantage of growing mobile Internet use, particularly mobile search, which tends to generate more contextual queries.
Siri traces its origins to a military-funded artificial-intelligence project called CALO, for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes," that is based at the research institute SRI International. The project's leaders--including Cheyer--combined traditionally isolated approaches to artificial intelligence to try to create a personal-assistant program that improves by interacting with its user. Cheyer, while still at SRI, took a team of engineers aside and built a sample consumer version; colleagues finally persuaded him to start a company based on the prototype. Siri licenses its core technology from SRI.
Mindful of the sometimes spectacular failure of previous attempts to create a virtual personal assistant, Siri's founders have set their sights conservatively. The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context. Siri is connected to multiple online services, so a quick interaction with it can accomplish several small tasks that would normally require visits to a number of websites. Recent improvements in computer processor power have been essential in bringing this level of sophistication to a consumer product, Cheyer says. Many of CALO's abilities still can't be crammed into such products. But the growing power of mobile phones and the increasing speed of networks make it possible to handle some of the processing at Siri's headquarters and pipe the results back to users, allowing the software to take on tasks that just couldn't be done before. "Search does what search does very well, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon," says Dag Kittlaus, Siri's cofounder and CEO. "[But] we believe that in five years, everyone's going to have a virtual assistant to which they delegate a lot of the menial tasks."
While the software will be intelligent and useful, the company has no aspiration to make it seem human. "We think that we can create an incredible experience that will help you be more efficient in your life, in solving problems and the tasks that you do," Cheyer says. But Siri is always going to be just a tool, not a rival to human intelligence: "We're very practical minded."
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| Google now |
On the other hand, Google has already tried to counter Apple's Siri with its Google Search app and Google Now, but now the company is taking a bigger leap into artificial intelligence. Since Ray Kurzweil was named Director of Engineering at Google in December, he has dived into an artificial intelligence project that would ultimately be a Google user's "cybernetic friend." Unlike Siri, Google's AI project aims to learn and know what the user will need before they ask for it. When the product is called on, the user will get a comprehensive answer based on history, interests and activities. Instead of understanding the question as a string of literal words, Google's AI will aim to have a deeper understanding of the meaning. "It is ambitious. In fact there is no more important project than understanding intelligence and recreating it," said Kurzweil in an interview. "This is obviously not the only project in the world to do with artificial intelligence, but I do envision a fundamental approach based on everything we understand about how the human brain does it." The AI product will be designed to skim and analyze information, then bring the user information they need or would find interesting. Kurzweil even suggested it could listen in on phone conversations, analyze emails and look at schedules to predict what users need. He gave the example of rerouting a user's commute if it knew there was an accident close to an appointment. It could even update departure time if it foresees a delay. However, one of the biggest challenges with this project is teaching a computer how to understand human language. "The project we plan to do is focused on natural language understanding," said Kurzweil. "We want to give computers the ability to understand the language that they're reading." He pointed to the example of blog posts: they're not just words on a screen, but they're meant to convey something. Kurzweil said the AI project could be applied to Google's current services and options, like its language translator. Understanding a message rather than the simple word mechanics could make the translator function even more accurate. However, the immediate goal is to apply it to Google's core products, like search and question and answering. "It will know at a semantically deep level what you're interested in, not just the topic … it will know the specific questions and concerns you have and be constantly surveying the knowledge that comes out every minute and bring things to your attention that you'll want," he said. "I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It'll just know this is something that you're going to want to see." Some have accused Kurzweil's ideas on using brain secrets to unlock the key to artificial intelligence have been as doing the exact opposite. "(They) reverse engineer his own companies' computer systems in order to propose a theory about how the mind works," wrote Gary Marcus of the New Yorker in an article about Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.
However, it's no secret that Google plans to stay head-to-head with Apple's products and services. They've made that clear with Google Now, an app not unlike Siri that can respond to voice commands and queries. But while Siri does third party searches for results, Google Now goes directly to Google itself. Like the Kurzweil's AI project, and other Google inventions, Google Now simply builds on the company's core products to improve the other services. "The best thing about Google Now is that it uses every system that Google has built in the last 10 years. It touches almost every back-end system at Google," said Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android, in a Technology Review interview. The result, he added, is an "increase in a person's tranquility, as opposed to having to install an app or do a search or open the browser to navigate to a webpage."
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| Jarvis, from Science fiction movie Iron Man, a perfect example of artificial intelligent personal assistant. |
There are so many contenders in this race. The Android and Apple app stores are filled with personal assistants of various kinds. Some draw primarily on calendar data (Donna, Sunrise, Tempo) and others on e-mail or location (Osito, reQall). Apple, which looked somewhat behind the curve on predictive intelligence, bought Cue, a personalised-agenda app, in October. It included some predictive features in the latest update to its mobile-device operating system, iOS 7, such as estimated journey times to frequently visited locations
As ever more personal information becomes centralised in smartphones and the accuracy of positioning technology increases, these assistants will be able to learn new tricks. But innovators must tread carefully. For one thing, predictive intelligence can be creepy. Some people may not like the idea that their phone is tracking what they are doing so closely. It’s also hard to get right: assistants will inevitably make mistaken predictions, leading to unwanted notifications. Many smartphone users are already struggling with “notification fatigue” as apps and online services compete for their attention.
The next generation of assistant software aims to go one step further by pursuing an approach known as “predictive intelligence”. It exploits the fact that smartphones now have access to fast internet links and location data, and can draw upon personal information, address books, e-mail and calendars. The aim of these new assistants is to anticipate what information users need, based on context and past behaviour, and to provide it before they have even asked for it. Such an assistant might, for example, spontaneously suggest that you leave early for a meeting, because it has spotted heavy traffic en route; present directions to your hotel when you arrive in a foreign country; offer to book a taxi or hotel based on analysis of an incoming e-mail or text message; or offer personalised suggestions for dinner in the evening.
As Marx concluded that change in a civilization in modern times is brought by modern equipments and technologies, not by change of state of mind, it seems that IPAs have become an almost inseparable part of people’s life. The IPAs can anyhow replace a dumb personal assistant but the question arises is can it take the place of a human. If this technology kept on progressing this, no one can foretell which way it take. All the technologies are created for human assistance and human welfare but some of them turn out the other way. What if you IPA on your smartphone turned against you? It’s a dreadful thought I know. But don’t worry to give so much brain to an IPA, it will take at least a decade.
Online sources:
2 comments:
Very Nice Article.
Very nice article.
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