What's the Best Way to Interact With Smart Appliances (Video)
Learn more at KMWorld 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.
Watch the complete video of this presentation, “Rethinking KM for an Age of AI and IoT" in the KMWorld Conference 2018 Video Portal.
In a session at KMWorld 2018, Daniel W. Rasmus, founder & principal analyst, Serious Insights, sliced through the hype on AI as a universal job disruptor. The bigger threat and benefit, he contends, comes not for high-level cognitive computing, but from very specific skills that eventually outpace the ability of humans to understand what the technology is actually doing.
Looking at one myth of intelligence, Rasmus asked the KMWorld audience how many have an Alexa at home now? Then he asked, “Does anybody do more than 25 things with it?” The answer he said, is no. “Because why? You can't remember what you're supposed to do with it. Right? This is one of the problems that we're seeing. This is a great example that's very much in the consumer space that we're seeing with AI is that if I want to go into a Dr. Who quiz, I have to tell Alexa that I want to do a quiz on Dr. Who, ask Dr. Who a question. But I have to remember that that's a skill I've enabled, so I have to now remember all of these skills that I've enabled. Then I have to remember the vocabulary that the skill builder has embedded into the system.”
According to Rasmus, when you look at the architecture of Alexa there is this very, very fine natural language processing system that will parse, most of the time, parse what you're saying. That is, unless your daughter's name is Alyssa, as his is. “Very often I'm yelling, ‘Alyssa, it's time for dinner.’” But, he said, Alexa is replying that she doesn’t know what to do about that—and that’s a minor flaw.
“I think the bigger flaw is just the architecture side,” Rasmus noted. “So again, this myth that because we have one piece of a problem of cognitive computing solved where we think we can actually have this natural language dialog, the back end stuff is all knowledge-based. We haven't figured it out and Amazon knows this. Amazon knows that the skill architecture is a little clunky.”
Many speakers have made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2018/Presentations.aspx.