Are You Ready For A Futuristic Virtual Assistant In Your Pocket?
We are all familiar with the virtual assistants that we have in our smartphones as these have soared in popularity in the recent years thanks to the cutting edge development trying to make them ever more human.
Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana are the most popular virtual assistants with Siri being quite the pop culture favourite even though Google's assistant leads in terms of being the most advanced.
All these companies are racing to develop the ultimate virtual assistant that would act and work just like a real, human assistant but would live on your smart devices and would be capable of doing much more in a fraction of the time.
Although every company is making progress in this field, it is Google that leads the way and recently, they demoed a new futuristic AI system (Google Duplex) that they have been working on, that you just have to see for yourself to believe. I mean, it's sci-fi stuff happening in the real world!
Google Duplex Books A Haircut Appointment
Google is developing an AI system for its Google Assistant that it will most probably be launching for everyone in the world in the future and it is a technological marvel, at least according to current standards.
It is a virtual assistant on steroids basically, that can pretend to be human on your behalf (essentially becoming your personal assistant) and can book appointments for you by talking with real human beings in a way that they cannot tell it is actually a virtual assistant. It really sounds like a human with all the subtle nuances present.
To understand it better, imagine Siri taking your calls or making them on your behalf, just like how a human assistant would do. But in this case, the other person isn't able to tell that it is actually Siri talking. Isn't that just next level awesome? I have been waiting for this for years, ever since I first had the chance to use Siri.
Google has mentioned in detail about the back end technology it uses for the AI system and it also has the recordings of the actual calls between the assistant and the humans (including the haircut appointment one) and I implore you to check it out here. You will definitely be left impressed.
Just The Beginning
I really can't wrap my head around the fact that even though we are at the infancy of developing Artificial Intelligence, we are already beginning to reap such impressive rewards out of it.
Imagine the future, maybe ten or twenty years down the road. Imagine how powerful AI systems of the world would have become and the sheer amount of mind-bending things they will allow us to do and make our lives easier.
This is the thing about AI. It has a tonne of applications in the real world and no sector is going to remain untouced by it. I mean, this example of virtual assistant being able to act like human is already happening and yet it is just a tiny aspect of human living.
It is rightly said that AI will augment human life in ways never been done before and as I have said in the past, AI may be the ultimate invention of human kind that will take care of all future inventions for us. The future, sure is exciting.
That new Google Assistant is scary as fuck. I mean the amount of info it could have on you, could learn about you and the ways in which it can use it. I'm definitely not upgrading to Android 9.0 lol.
haha yeah, as always, privacy is the first thing that is sacrificed in futuristic tech like this.
techonolgy is very fast to the forward thanks for sharing this posts
Yes it is.
I have a visual impaired friend whose life has completely changed once she was able to use google to translate her voice into text or vice-versa. It is when you see this services that you realize of the real potential of AI applied to this virtual assistant.
I agree. There are countless benefits of AI and we are just beginning to see them. I just hope it doesn't go towards a destructive direction.
a lot probably will be focused on how the elites can avoid / keep the riff-raff out of their lives !!
THIS.
haha true that!
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Thanks for this!
The technology is getting better and scarier with each passing day.
Begs the question, how much can we still achieve
It sure is getting scarier which was not a problem before. I guess we are entering a new age in technological progress where the stakes are much more real than ever before.
As for the question of how much we can still achieve, well, let me just tell you that we are actually just beginning.
I agree, the possibilities are infinite
I think we are still a long way off from truly "unassisted virtual assistants". Google has demonstrated some very intriguing tech demos indeed but they are far from mainstream readiness. Apart from AI and prediction engines natural language processing is an intricate art all of its own. Thanks for sharing!
We sure are a long ways off before we can use this tech in our phones but I'm sure one day we will for sure. Google is already planning to roll out a test of Google Duplex so who knows how far or near this really is.
Now the standard for testing an artificial intelligence is using the Turing Test. So do you believe that any machine can pass the test in 10 years?
Yes, I am sure of it.