Virtual Personal Assistants: How far will they go? Part 2

In the last post, I spoke about the advent of the Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) in terms of Gartners predictions as to where they will go and how popular culture sees them coming to enable our lives.

For the second part of this post, I wanted to talk about my first work experience - ever - with a fully virtual assistant.

Let me set the context.

In the course of my work, I was dealing with a vendor who was trying to arrange a meeting with us through his personal assistant, Amy Ingram.

So we were going back and forth to fix a date and time for the conference call.

I responded to the initial request as follows:

"Hi Amy,

Actually out of town on Tuesday; Thursday is open though. Does that work with you?"

"Her" response was (using Billy as a pseudonym):

"Hi Malik,

I'm sorry, but that time doesn't work for "Billy".

How about Wednesday, Jun 22 at 11:30 AM EDT? "Billy" is also available Wednesday, Jun 22 at 3:00 PM EDT or Thursday, Jun 23 at 9:00 AM.

Amy"


When I read Amy's response, I thought to myself something like: "I told her that Thursday is open, so why did she say that doesn't work for the "Billy"?"  But I thought something like "whatever" and just responded with:

"Thursday at 9 am works, thanks"

To which Amy responded:

"Hi Malik,

Thanks for letting me know.

I'll send out an invite once I've confirmed a time with "Jim".

Amy"

[Jim is my colleague; true name hidden for confidentiality purposes]

Eventually, it dawned on me: I wasn't dealing with a person, but a robot!

And then it hit me: the future is here.

The one thing that I realized through my interaction is how forgiving I was about the error because I thought the thing on the other side was human: everyone makes mistakes and so it's no big deal that "she" didn't get that I was open on Thursday.

This has a deeper implication on how "knowledge work" gets automated.

When we gauge machines for the ability to perform cognitive tasks, such as booking meetings, we should be careful as to how good is good enough for us to work with machines instead of humans. As we can see based on my interaction, they don't need to be perfect - they just need to get the job done.

In my interaction above, we were able to schedule a meeting and the fact "she" didn't understand that I had told her Thursday was open had no real consequence on the overall role "she" was playing. The meeting eventually got booked and that was that.

Ironically, I realized that I had already come across Amy at the DLD Conference in NY that had attend a few weeks earlier.

Dennis Mortensen (Founder of x.ai.), describes the challenge of setting up meeting and how this technology can solve the problem (profanity alert!):

His talk starts 5m47s:

As Dennis mentions, it's a very basic problem but at the same time it's so complicated. Specifically, the challenge with dealing with politeness: it's hard for AI to parse through this and understand the substantive facts that pertain to setting up the meeting. If we take a look at my response, we can see the challenges first hand:

• When I said I was out of town that the AI had to understand that meant I am not available. 
• I did not include Wednesday as a date that was possible so that implies that I'm also not available that day.
• When I stated I was open on Thursday, I meant I was available all day. 

So what does this mean for jobs? Are accountants going to be replaced by Amy one day?

It's actually shows the level of complexity involved in the most basic of human interactions and how much more complex it would be to train AI in terms of doing even the most basic of auditing procedures - at least for now. 

Dennis actually made a good point about this in the Q&A portion of the discussion as it relates to jobs. The other presenter noted how he sees massive displacement as a result of AI; specifically in the truck driving industry. Dennis, on the other hand, was a bit more optimistic. He noted that what tools like his will do is essentially give assistants to people who don't have assistants. For example, the vendor we were dealing likely wouldn't have hired an assistant to help book appointments. 

And I think that's where auditors and accountants need to actually see how AI assistants, like Amy Ingram, can help with automating those mundane tasks that none of likes to do.  

Virtual Personal Assistants: How far will they go? Part 1

Gartner in a recent press release gave some predictions around "virtual personal assistants".

What are virtual personal assistants or VPAs?

Currently, they are the not-so-perfect voice-activated software that accompanies our mobile devices - Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana and Google has Google Now

On the latest Google phone, Pixel, they have Google Assistant:


Although only available for limited release, the video is actually a good summary of the promise of VPAs: the software that will help us coordinate our lives through our-ever-so-central-to-our-lives smartphones.

And that takes us back to how important these VPAs will become. According to Gartner, within two years 20% of all interactions with our smartphones will be through VPAs.

The press release from the research giant also noted some interesting stats on how frequently people are using Siri and Google Now.

In the UK/US, 54% of people surveyed used Siri in the last 3 months. With respect to Google Now, 41% have used it in the UK and 48% have used the service in the US (in the last 3 months). They also noted that they will move from simple tasks (e.g. setting alarms) to more complicated things such as executing transactions.

By 2020, Gartner predicts that VPAs combined with machine learning, IoT, biometrics and other technologies will enable 2 billion devices to operate without a touch interface.

How far can this go?

When I was thinking about writing this post, I thought about my first interaction with an artificial intelligent assistant.  However, before going there I thought it would be first interesting to go back to the movie "Her".

I saw the movie on the plane on one of the business trips that I took.

The movie is about the ultimate stage of, well, virtual personal assistants.

As noted in the trailer below, the "OS" is something that exists on the mobile device but acts as a central management point that brings a persons data together. In the movie, the OS (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) has a real personality that in a sense accompanies the protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, everywhere. The movie goes a bit crazy as they apparently start "dating".

On a side note, I thought the movie was interesting as it speaks to how technology has filled the void in the life of the atomized individual. The story shows how the protagonist has had a bad breakup and turns to this OS for substitute companionship.

Sure this is far-fetched.

But how many times have we left a real conversation with a real loved one only to get to the virtual world of our phones? Of course, it's not some fake person but it's not difficult to see how we could switch the artificial world of VPAs because we have become accustomed to interacting with this endless streams of notifications.

The other part of the movie that I found interesting was how the mobile device is so nondescript. For someone like myself, smartphones have always had this novelty. But in the movie it's a not anything exciting to look at it. In a sense, what's more important is the actual OS running the device. As Gartner predicts, what becomes more important is the "touch-free interaction" between the OS and Joaquin - and the device disappears into the background.

Only time will tell how far this technology go. But I think it's fairly easy to see how such VPAs will become more entrenched in our lives the more "human" they become.