VIRTUALLY INTELLIGENT 6 WAYS TO BUILD YOUR OWN ARMY OF INTELLIGENT ASSISTANTS Kathi Vian 2016 Ten-Year Forecast

1 Talk or text… … to your assistants The accelerating ability of computers to process natural language is driving the development of intelligent assistants that can respond to vocal or text inputs, going beyond simple look-up services to meet diverse needs in the physical as well as virtual worlds.   WeChat Secretary: AI mobile app uses WeChat interface to help foreigners get services in Beijing http://www.bespoketravelcompany.com/urbanedit/the-real-reason-why-bespoke-can-focus-on-our-clients/ Source: Bespoke Travel Company

2 Get life coaches… … to be your best self With the ability to analyze large amounts of text will come the ability to analyze everything from one’s health records to one’s personality, and AI-based life coaches will tap this ability to provide personal lifestyle guidance, perhaps hour by hour. http://welltok.com/blog/article_cwconciergevideo.html CafeWell Concierge: IBM Watson-empowered mobile app engages users in health dialogs based on medical and lifestyle data Source: Welltok

3 Engage your personal PR agent… … to boost your personal brand As intelligent agents get smarter at tracking your public voice, they will become personal PR assistants that “place” you where you need to be in the social media scene—and even coach you on how to make your social voice more engaging. Rantic: Online service helps you build a following on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook http://www.rantic.com/ Source: Rantic

4 Tap into government services… … with artificially intelligent help Intelligent assistants will offer a more user-friendly interface between citizens and the complex bureaucracies of their governments. These assistants may even take on personalities that match your individual political views and civic goals. http://www.artificial-solutions.com/about-artificial-solutions/resources/registered-case-studies/ IDA: Natural language interaction assistant helps Norwegian drivers navigate the Public Roads Administration Source: Artificial Solutions

5 Get support for your role… … to keep you professional As intelligent assistants proliferate—and as they get more intelligent—they will develop abilities to support specific roles, from doctors and nurses to real estate agents and even policemen. They will improve role performance by identifying opportunities for refinements and giving a heads-up when role-related risks increase. http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/police-misconduct-algorithm/ White House Police Data Initiative: Algorithm predicts when police officers are likely to turn to violence Source: Digital Trends

6 Automate your automated assistants… … to reduce your management burden As assistants proliferate, users will become managers of many assistants, and like many managers, they will need help coordinating all those assistants. The market will likely respond with solutions that automate the management of automated assistants. http://www.cultofandroid.com/72556/facebook-messenger-wants-to-be-your-chatty-pipeline-to-the-world/ Messenger’s Chat SDK: Facebook’s intelligent assistant integrates diverse intelligent assistants from 3rd-party developers Source: Cult of Android

What’s driving intelligent assistants? Decades of research into natural language processing are finally yielding results as supercomputing power becomes available to interpret large tracts of text or audio. Much more complex than translating one language into another, this interpretive code translates what is typed or spoken into what is meant. The result, starting a few years back, was a handful of voice-controlled interfaces that could function as general-purpose virtual assistants.   Over the next decade, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of special-purpose virtual assistants will emerge as these interfaces are embedded into all kinds of applications—taking advantage of everything from location sensing to environmental sensing to mood sensing. Rather than a single general-purpose virtual assistant like Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now, or Amazon’s Echo, a tech-savvy generation will adopt a multiplicity of assistants to help them work, learn, eat, exercise, play and even pray better than they can on their own. These assistants will use natural language processing not just to respond to simple voice requests but to follow voice and video conversations and scan text in email, chat, text messaging systems, and even notepads and to-do lists. They will interpret these narrative fragments in the context of sensor data that describes the user’s physical experience. And from all this data, they will not only figure out what we, as users, want them to do. They will teach us how to do what we want to do better—and perhaps even shape what we want to do. continued

What’s driving virtual assistants? ...continued Because they will use learning algorithms, they will gradually become more and more personalized. They will speak to us in our native vernacular. They will recognize our values and aesthetic preferences, our weaknesses and our strengths. They will know our needs and hopes and goals before we do, teaching us as much as they serve us.   Perhaps most important, this army of intelligent virtual assistants will be social. Of course, any one of our assistants will learn to coordinate with our other assistants to keep harmony in our digital households. But they will also coordinate with the other virtual assistants serving other individuals and organizations in our networks, discovering how to meet our needs in a complex ecosystem of personal economies and social contracts. The question is: Will we build some basic social goals into their code? Will we wire them for both competition and cooperation, as we ourselves are wired? Will we tilt the advantage toward the individual or the collective? Most likely, the culture of virtual assistants that emerges as these digital intelligences proliferate will be a culture that reflects the people they serve—as competitive and cooperative, as task-driven and creative as we as a society are. It’s possible, however, that as they learn about us, we will also learn about ourselves. And seeing who we are, we will engage our assistants to help us be not just our best selves but our best humanity.