Visions & opinions news

On November 1, 2011 I gave a talk to Google on natural language processing, including chatbot technology and issues in understanding simple English sentences for a story-game demo which tries to act out the sentences. Download the PDF or read full text below.

Fresh Perspectives

I am an AI research engineer. I want to create things that people use, but that stretch the boundaries of the possible. Whatever I work on, I research it and then try to come at it with a fresh perspective. A fresh perspective is something Google and I have in common, though we approach things from opposite directions. Typically my fresh perspectives involve understanding a domain and then writing a new application-specific scripting language to encapsulate insights I have gleaned. Google’s perspectives come from access to massive amounts of data and hardware.

I research everything. I even researched how to give this talk. I thought about making a lot of clever PowerPoint slides. Then I read up on using and abusing PowerPoint. I abandoned that plan.

First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.

For companies trying to win corporate and consumer adoption of their own NLP technologies, this is a long-awaited moment. And one of the firms that thinks 2012 could be the year this market really takes off is VirtuOz VirtuOz, Inc., a Paris-born company that moved its headquarters to Emeryville, CA, in 2009.

In a recent release Gartner predicted its top ten disruptive technologies for 2012. Amongst the expected and rather predictable media tablets, app stores and cloud computing, Gartner says that icons, menus and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces such as gesture, voice and search. But voice isn’t everything. For it to be a successful method of interaction, voice needs an underlying intelligence.

The day when artificial intelligence (AI) reaches the stage of self-awareness is “lifetimes” away, the innovation officer at MyCyberTwin has claimed.

Speaking to Computerworld Australia about the possibility of intelligent machines roaming the earth, MyCyberTwin’s chief innovation officer and co-founder, John Zakos, said such a leap in technology may take lifetimes.

If Graham Bell had journeyed into the future he would probably be amazed to see how his invention, the telephone, has entirely changed the way people communicate with each other and with their phones. No longer is the phone merely an object that enables you to talk to someone who is not in the same place as you, the phone itself has now become a personal assistant, someone you can give orders to and who will talk back to you. How did all that become possible?

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that a happy wife makes a happy life. So a few weeks ago when my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world, I wanted to show my excitement and love for our new little addition. The first morning I was headed back to work at Astute Solutions after the baby was born, I decided to call and order flowers to be sent to her – after all, what woman doesn’t love getting flowers?

As I navigated traffic, I searched for a florist and placed my call to order. What ensued was a frustrating experience to say the least, particularly because it ended in no flowers for my wife, and no sale for the company.

I was immediately greeted with a voice asking me to choose from a variety of options. But while listening to the various menu options and weaving in and out of cars, the frustration began to set in. After pressing “3” for sales, “2” for a mail order, “4” for specialty orders, and “1” to purchase via credit card with no avail, I was fed up. I just wanted to speak to an agent and order flowers. I hung up the phone without speaking to someone and never placed an order.

Some might say I’m impatient, but I’m much like everyone else including your customers - busy! And working with customer-focused companies at Astute Solutions, I’m sensitive to customer experience. I just wanted to be able to place my order, and in the absence of an available agent, I would have settled for speaking with a computer.

My scenario is not unique, as we all know. The customer service world is not at a loss for examples and stories which support this very frustration. But the good news is that the concept of a “virtual agent” works to mitigate this frustration, and in many cases increase customer satisfaction. Here’s how:

The intelligent virtual agent (IVA) value proposition is so compelling for both the online consumer and the business provider that leading analyst firm Gartner Research predicts that virtual agents will be the standard technology for customer interactions in two to four years.  The aggressive adoption of IVAs is a consumer led revolution in which an increasingly large generation of users, including but not limited to digital natives, are living in an online world where blogging, texting, tweeting, eCommerce, and social networks are the way of life.  This Web savvy consumer prefers both their personal and business engagements to be conducted online.  The IVA offers a compelling customer experience that aligns with the consumer’s expectations.

Definitions of ‘virtual agent’ within the chatbot industry seem to vary according to developer’s objectives. In interviews between CRM Magazine and three virtual agent companies, the following definitions of virtual agent were identified:

• Mark Gaydos, vice president of worldwide marketing at VirtuOz: The ability to interact with a customer and, in a sense, understand what the customer wants to do and guide them to an answer to their question.
• David Lloyd, CEO of IntelliResponse: It is a way of interacting and delivering customer self-service.
• Ashutosh Roy, chairman and CEO of eGain: A virtual agent is a human-like bot that understands natural language interactions and guides a visitor though a conversational interface using text and/or speech input and output.

What would happen when various individual virtual agents cooperate and process data through interdisciplinary systems?

According to an article of David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, interactive virtual agents could end up playing a huge role in saving the planet and its evolution could grow exponentially.