How may the virtual assistant help you?

With improved speech recognition, expanded functionality and different approaches toward answering queries, the virtual assistant is no longer a party trick

November 17, 2015 04:17 pm | Updated November 18, 2015 02:31 am IST

Talking is the way people prefer to communicate this generation. Photo: AP

Talking is the way people prefer to communicate this generation. Photo: AP

“Hey there Moto X.”I can’t see where the phone is, apart from a vague understanding that it is somewhere on the bed, but I hear the faint beep that lets me know it’s up and listening. A glance at the watch near the bed tells me I have a little more time before tumbling out of bed.

“Set an alarm for half an hour from now.”A female voice reassures me that an alarm has been set, and I slip back under the sheets for some more shut eye.

Meet the highly evolved virtual assistant, a part of mobile phone operating systems in some form since the early part of this decade. Apple brought it to the limelight with Siri, an assistant baked into its iPhones, which could offer up useful information and even take optimistic stabs at showing it had a sense of humour. People obviously loved the new functionality, but while they secretly attempted to have conversations with Siri in the isolation of their homes, most would not be caught dead talking to their handheld device in public.

Midway through the same decade however, the virtual assistant is now a different beast. Google launched Now, a predictive system that utilises the company’s near-omniscient Knowledge Graph and the information we the users knowingly or unknowingly provide Google access to.

Now can read emails and remind us of packages in transit and upcoming meetings, realise we’re about to travel and warn us of what weather to expect, and use location to tell us interesting spots to visit nearby. It is all incredible functionality, and it comes at the cost of giving away a lot of personal information. Very much like striking the proverbial deal with the devil, and hoping the devil does not have a hidden agenda.

This is a good time to wonder where the assistant is headed. The idea started out as a vaguely helpful but mostly amusing party trick. Today, Microsoft is pushing into the space across mobile and PC with Cortana (a homage to the synthetic intelligence from the popular Halo series of games), and phone manufactures like Samsung and Motorola have created their own iterations. One barrier faced by most software of this kind is the inherent weirdness of having to talk to an inanimate object, irrespective of how good it is at understanding human speech. But even that barrier is slowly being eroded by the surge in wearable technology.

One of the key features smartwatches today advertise is the ability to respond to text messages by talking to the device strapped to the wrist. And with phones reaching sizes that makes getting them out of pockets cumbersome, people are beginning to grudgingly choose this helpful alternative. From there, it is not a huge leap to the future depicted by Spike Jonze in Her.

As Whatsapp and a host of other messaging platforms have proved, people prefer texting to actually talking on the phone, and developers have not been ignorant of this fact. US-based Magic and India’s own Haptik allow users to post queries to a team of real people over chat, and get usable responses. There is no fiddling about with not having your sentences recognised because of an accent, or using a phrase software cannot decipher. These human-powered assistants are on hand to help with problems ranging from ordering food and finding cheap air tickets to sending flowers to a loved one. Facebook has also caught on to the potential of this approach, and is hard at work on M, its own version of the assistant which is reported to be baked into its Messenger app. M supposedly uses a mix of text recognition and human responses to provide users with the answers they require. By adding the functionality to the widely-used Messenger app, the company also ensures widespread adoption without putting users through the effort of downloading a new app. Here in late 2015, the one thing we know for sure is that the assistant, whether it recognises your voice or your words, is here to stay. No longer a party trick, this may be the beginning of the drive towards better artificial intelligence and simpler lives. So long as no one goes and builds one called Skynet.

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