Conversation is the ultimate user interface
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We may be living in the golden age of information, but finding the right information is still a challenge. To meet this challenge, my team and I at Amazon Alexa are building what we believe is the next-generation user interface that will redefine the way we interact with technology and find information.
We spend hours every day hunched over phones and laptops. We open, close and reopen applications. We parade. We type on tiny QWERTY keyboards. And we click on an endless sea of blue links every time we search the web. The internet is indeed amazing. The user interface is not.
We agreed to these terms because, since the dawn of the digital age, this is all we know. But these modes of interaction with the digital universe have been developed in the service of economic models, and not of the user experience. They are designed to increase the time you spend online, generate clicks, and maximize engagement time. But it's unfair to force humans to find information this way. And it's time to move on.
Conversation: The Age-Old InterfaceThe first step is to change the way we interact with the Internet. And thankfully, recent advancements in AI make a whole new user interface possible. In fact, it's the original interface, the one we've been using for almost two million years. This is called "conversation".
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Learn about the essential role of AI and ML in cybersecurity and industry-specific case studies. Watch the on-demand sessions today.
look hereNo speech, mind you. We've been using it for nearly a decade already, interacting with our phones and digital assistants like Alexa. I'm talking about a real, human conversation. The kind you might have with a friend over a beer, in which vague or poorly worded questions are understood. Conversations in which intent is inferred and answers to questions are summarized and personalized.
When two people converse, they understand each other's context and incorporate visual cues. Conversations can be concise and effective. Or they may cover a variety of topics, change direction, and lead to a chance find. Humans do this without even thinking about it. But teaching a machine to do this requires significant advances in the science of AI. It's not just about natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, which are rapidly improving with every voice interaction (Alexa alone receives more than a billion queries every week from hundreds of millions of devices in over 17 languages.)
AI in millisecondsOn the contrary, for a machine to learn the give-and-take nature of conversation, we need to fundamentally rethink our current information retrieval system, including the ability to crawl billions of web pages in real time ( web-scale neural information retrieval), concisely summarize information from the vastness of the web (automated summarization), and the ability to recognize an end-user's intent and recommend additional relevant content ( using contextual recommendation engines).
Conversational interfaces require these systems (and many others) to work together seamlessly and instantly. For example, if you ask an AI assistant, "Where is the oldest living tree in the world?" he should be able to not only answer this question...
Check out all the Smart Security Summit on-demand sessions here.
We may be living in the golden age of information, but finding the right information is still a challenge. To meet this challenge, my team and I at Amazon Alexa are building what we believe is the next-generation user interface that will redefine the way we interact with technology and find information.
We spend hours every day hunched over phones and laptops. We open, close and reopen applications. We parade. We type on tiny QWERTY keyboards. And we click on an endless sea of blue links every time we search the web. The internet is indeed amazing. The user interface is not.
We agreed to these terms because, since the dawn of the digital age, this is all we know. But these modes of interaction with the digital universe have been developed in the service of economic models, and not of the user experience. They are designed to increase the time you spend online, generate clicks, and maximize engagement time. But it's unfair to force humans to find information this way. And it's time to move on.
Conversation: The Age-Old InterfaceThe first step is to change the way we interact with the Internet. And thankfully, recent advancements in AI make a whole new user interface possible. In fact, it's the original interface, the one we've been using for almost two million years. This is called "conversation".
EventOn-Demand Smart Security Summit
Learn about the essential role of AI and ML in cybersecurity and industry-specific case studies. Watch the on-demand sessions today.
look hereNo speech, mind you. We've been using it for nearly a decade already, interacting with our phones and digital assistants like Alexa. I'm talking about a real, human conversation. The kind you might have with a friend over a beer, in which vague or poorly worded questions are understood. Conversations in which intent is inferred and answers to questions are summarized and personalized.
When two people converse, they understand each other's context and incorporate visual cues. Conversations can be concise and effective. Or they may cover a variety of topics, change direction, and lead to a chance find. Humans do this without even thinking about it. But teaching a machine to do this requires significant advances in the science of AI. It's not just about natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, which are rapidly improving with every voice interaction (Alexa alone receives more than a billion queries every week from hundreds of millions of devices in over 17 languages.)
AI in millisecondsOn the contrary, for a machine to learn the give-and-take nature of conversation, we need to fundamentally rethink our current information retrieval system, including the ability to crawl billions of web pages in real time ( web-scale neural information retrieval), concisely summarize information from the vastness of the web (automated summarization), and the ability to recognize an end-user's intent and recommend additional relevant content ( using contextual recommendation engines).
Conversational interfaces require these systems (and many others) to work together seamlessly and instantly. For example, if you ask an AI assistant, "Where is the oldest living tree in the world?" he should be able to not only answer this question...
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