Smart Interaction Beyond the Smartphone

A similar opinion as stated in my last blog about Smartphones as Explicit Devices do not meet Weiser's Vision of Ubiquitous Computing stated Jennifer Winter in a blog  for user testing. In her blog Will AI Replace Your Smartphone? she bemoaned the bad user experience of smartphones requiring their users to pick up their phones, start an application to actually go for what they really want.

She sees more user friendliness in those interactions that disappear (similar to Weiser's vision). And there is some potential in it, despite the fact that users become addicted to their smartphones. Jennifer Winter mentions a statement from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2015, that 79 percent of smartphone users have their phones within arm's reach for all but three hours of the day.

However, users see alternatives to that as a study by the Ericsson's Consumer Lab revealed.The study states: "1 in 2 smartphones users now thinks that smartphones will be a thing of the past, and that this will happen in just 5 years." Users want smart interaction with objects, but it does not need to be mediated by the smartphone. The study reveals even more potential about the use of artificial intelligence in our lives:

• 85 % think wearable electronic assistants will be common within 5 years
• 50 % believe they will be able to talk to household appliances, as they do to people
• ...

More statements are in the following figure of that study.

Consumers who think using artificial intelligence (AI) would be a good idea 

It is unfortunate. that the study does not differentiate between AI and its interface. And so does Jennifer Winter. The technology behind the stuff we have with smartphones today is for sure artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, ... The difference lies in the interface which should (and will) disappear in the next few years.

NLU vs Dialog Management

Recently, I stumbled across a blog from api.ai that their system now supports slot filling: https://api.ai/blog/2015/11/09/SlotFilling/. Note, that my goal is not on blaming their system.

Currently, I observe that efforts towards spoken interaction coming from cognitive computing are still not fully aware of what has been done in dialog management research in the past decades, and vice versa. Both parties are coming from different centers in the chain of spoken dialog systems.

While the AI community usually focuses on natural language understanding (linguistic analysis) the spoken dialog community focuses on the dialog manager as the central point in this chain.

Both have good reasons for their attitude and are able to deliver convincing results.

Cognitive computing sees the central point in the semantics which should also be grounded with previous utterances or external content. Speech input and output is in this view restricted to be some input into the system and some output. Dialog management can be really dumb in this case. Resulting user interfaces are currently more or less based on queries.

The dialog manager focused view regards the NLU to be some input into the system while the decision upon subsequent interaction is being handled in this component. Resulting user interfaces range from rigid state-based approaches over the information state update approach up to statistical motivated dialog managers like POMPD.

My hope is, that both communities start talking to each other to better incorporate convincing results of "the other component" to arrive at a convincing user experience.

Microsoft researchers expect human like capabilities of spoken systems in a few years

Researchers at Microsoft believe that we are only a few years away from equal capabilities of machines to understand spoken language as humans do. Although many advances have been made in the past years there are still too many challenges that need to be solved.This is especially true for distant speech recognition that we need to cope with in daily situations.  Maybe, their statement is still a bit too optimistic. However, as systems are available already and people start using it they are right in their assumption that these systems will make progress. We just have to make sure that voice based assistants like Cortana are used at all. Currently some of these systems seem to be more a gimmick to play with until users become bored of it. Hence, they are actually dammed to improve fast to also be helpful. 

http://news.microsoft.com/features/speak-hear-talk-the-long-quest-for-technology-that-understands-speech-as-well-as-a-human/