AI Weekly: If Duplex is the future, then Google Assistant, Alexa and Cortana should start working together

Last week, Google gave the world more information about Duplex, its conversational experimental AI that makes phone calls to schedule appointments or make restaurant reservations on your behalf. With the first trials scheduled to begin in the coming weeks, the company has shared additional information on how it will handle communication between a Google assistant user and businesses.

We will soon discover the effectiveness of Google Assistant for users, but if duplex succeeds, the next logical question is: what will happen when artificial intelligence that performs tasks for people will become dominant and will not only communicate with people, but with other robots

To-bot communication will soon be critical, that is why assistant manufacturers like Siri Alexa and Google Assistant have to work together.

AI assistants have been around for a while and increasing rates of adoption can be attributed largely to their declining word error rate and their increased ability to understand human language . But collaboration among key players will be essential to enable the next generation of assistants to develop useful use cases like Duplex and benefit from widespread adoption.

The most significant example of cooperation between Cortana Partnership assistants announced in 2017. Amazon and Microsoft plan to provide Cortana access on Echo devices and Alexa access on Windows 10 PCs because, they say, we will come to live in a multi-assistant world.

This feature, which we He began to see in action for the first time in May, making it essentially the most widely available assistant in the houses (Alexa) with the wizard most widely available on personal computers (Cortana). This goes even further than the nonexistent interaction between other assistants today, and Alexa can even tell jokes about Cortana, but that only changes when you can access the wizards and does not seem to incorporate the kind of intercommunication An example of how this might work is the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format made available last year for Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit interoperability, Caffe2 from Facebook, and PyTorch that brings together an ecosystem of engines and executives to train and deploy AI.

If assistant manufacturers also agreed on a common communication framework, this could encourage users to rely on these assistants for a growing number of tasks. This would open up opportunities for manufacturers of Siri, Alexa, etc., but it would also stimulate the entire conversational computing space. People could entrust more tasks to an assistant like Alexa or make room in their lives for specialized assistants designed to help them do their jobs more effectively or to achieve other goals.

It would be a world very different from the one living today where people are even more likely to use AI assistants to play music, set a timer or check the weather.

For an AI cover, send advice to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers and comments to Cosette Jarrett

Thank you for reading,

Khari Johnson
Staff Writer IA

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