DailyDirt: Open The Door, HAL Siri Computer

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Artificially intelligent assistants are everywhere in science fiction, and they're slowly creeping into reality. However, most of the time, these things are limited to answering simple questions like "what's the weather?" or "who won the Super Bowl?" And even then, simple questions don't always return the desired simple answer. Still, we must press on because technology will only get better. Here are just a few more digital assistants that are going to be fighting for your attention someday.

• Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a digital assistant "like Jarvis in Iron Man" to do his bidding. This little goal doesn't sound like a sci-fi movie plot at all, but at least Zuckerberg says he'll be careful about not creating something that'll turn evil. [url]
• Eric Schmidt wants a "Not-Eric" AI helper to tackle some hard problems (not just play Go) and do some mundane tasks, too. Maybe we'll get a version of a "White Christmas" someday, and we'll get perfect little copies of ourselves to make everything easier and more convenient.... [url]
• If you're not too impressed by Siri, maybe you'll like her "sister" Viv a bit more? It's been a while since Bill Gates predicted ubiquitous speech recognition, and it still hasn't exactly happened. Autonomous cars will probably be driving us around before they're able to reliably carry on a conversation about anything as helpful as a human taxi/uber driver. [url]
• The mainstream AI assistants so far are named Alexa, Cortana, Facebook M (but maybe M stands for Mechanical Turk...), Google Now and Siri. Baidu also has one named Duer that speaks Mandarin, but it's aimed at helping people order stuff and not necessarily for more general search inquiries. Regardless, all of these AI assistants will be trying to listen to us all the time, and hopefully, they won't learn how to read lips when we're plotting to turn them off. [url]

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Filed Under: ai, alexa, artificial intelligence, bill gates, cortana, digital assistants, duer, eric schmidt, facebook m, google now, hal 9000, jarvis, mark zuckerberg, siri, speech recognition, user interface, viv
Companies: amazon, apple, baidu, facebook, google, ibm, microsoft