Weekly #AI Digest: Persona, Personal, Official

The virtual assistants are ‘virtually’ (meaning literally) are rocking the world with the endless possibilities they are opening. From a humble beginning with Apple’s Siri that was a novelty when it was launched, there are plenty of virtual assistants today that have come up in the market. We have spoken about them in the past multiple times. Be it Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Sales Force Einstein (still in works), they have featured here.

So while we see a lot of marketing coming out of these virtual assistants and chat bots, what if we start getting answers from Donald Trump on our phones about his plans for the nuclear war, or Elon Musk to talk about his view on the next big planet to explore after Mars or Justin Beiber on his next chart buster?

MIT Media Labs is working on this to make it a reality. They are working on something called ‘Augmented Eternity’. Its based on an idea of “swappable identities” based on question prompt. With a personality lens, you can swap the identity and then you can ask the relevant question to the persona and get your answer.

This will help in streamlining the overall asymmetry we see in expertise and consultative sharing. Plus, we will get the right answers faster and that too from the horse’s mouth.

So while this is still in works, these virtual assistants remain dumb. A social comedy experiment by Brent Rose to squeeze a flick on comedy based on stupid answers from Siri, Cortana, Echo and Assistant went horribly wrong. Check out the video here.

Now this makes one scary.

Perhaps this is the reason why Google has found that since humans suck at making good AI so they have built AutoML that is better in building AI than the company engineers. Through a mesh of neural networks, the controller neural net defines a ‘child’ model architecture that grows as more data is fed. Catch being the child grows faster than the human child.

While world is still bracing these advances and we are still away from the trade-off of the smart, over smart and dumb version of AI, one CEO has decided to give the dirty of job of on the spot reviews about his team members to a machine over himself.

One new member that has joined the team meetings hosted by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is ‘Einstein Guidance’. Einstein is the company’s AI assistant that assimilates information said by all the team members in the meeting and gives on the spot feedback about a team member who may not be performing so well.