AI and UX: The Birth of Small Intelligence, Part 1
Who is your favorite Artificial Intelligence persona from any movie? This is the question that x.ai asked its Twitter followers a few weeks ago to spark interest in their contest for Ex Machina tickets and having your very own “Amy” — an AI-powered scheduling assistant.
Obviously I had to answer this question, for two reasons:
1) I love winning contests! Who doesn’t? And these startup Twitter contests have the best odds if you’re one of the few thousand followers that they have at the moment of their contest — FACT!
2) I’ve been on the Amy waitlist for months prior to finding out about the contest.
FLASHBACK
Back in February, I had set up a meeting with a successful entrepreneur and I had my first interaction with Amy. All was well and good, and for me my original interaction went so smoothly I honestly didn’t even know she was a machine. A week prior to our meeting, the host had to reschedule and lo-and-behold I see at the bottom of the screen
As a naturally curious tech enthusiast, I had to find out what black magic had been casted over me! If you haven’t yet, spend some time to learn about Amy. If you don’t sign up for the waiting list after that, then I’m not sure if you actually read what Amy can do.
Now, let’s fast-forward a few weeks, and I tweet out my response to x.ai. And what do you know, I get two tickets to see the movie and my own personal assistant. My life has never been the same, and Amy is my new best friend.
Since we’re an experience design agency, we had to test this technology to the fullest, so I set up multiple meetings, drinks, and coffees with the help of my colleagues to see where Amy would fail us. If it were an actual assistant handling all of this it would have been scheduling hell! We tested reschedules, venue changes, moving the meeting up a few hours, adding guests, and even rearranging a whole day of meetings. You name it, and we probably gave it a go! For the most part, she performed flawlessly. There was one instance where a guest wanted to change the location of a meeting and Amy pushed forward with scheduling my preference, but otherwise I had no issues.
You might be wondering why I’m so excited about this…well over the course of these weeks the discussion I’ve been having with friends and my co-workers in both the tech and design scene has been around whether the UX of AI is as important to the what that AI can provide to UX. That might not make perfect sense, so the best way I can explain it is by saying that my onboarding process with Amy didn’t really exist. She introduced herself and taught herself my preferences by digesting the data sets that existed within my Google calendar.
I would have preferred a little more education on what her capabilities were; but frustratingly, there was no such interaction. On the other side of the debate is the use of Amy-type technologies that could and have already started streamlining certain user experiences like customer support. Where do you see the differences or similarities between the two? Which is going to become the bigger problem space to tackle? IBM’s Watson is another kind of AI that is being adapted for many uses in areas such as heathcare, retail, and even the food industry to develop unusual food recipes based on user prefrences.
Next, I’m going to dig in a little deeper on this debate and highlight my experience at watching Dennis Mortensen, the CEO of x.ai, give a talk around how he sees everything coming together for the ultimate experience in the future of artificial intelligence. Dennis put it best when he said that the future is not in a Google- or Apple-like company coming out with an AI that does everything (we’ve all experienced the shortcomings of Siri!), but rather it is in the culmination of all these smaller intelligences seamlessly interacting with one another. In Part 2 of this post, I’m going to share some of the challenges Dennis had to overcome to bring Amy to life, and I will further explore the problems that AI is going to have to overcome in order to provide better end-to-end experiences.
Check back next week for Part 2!
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Originally published at www.motivatedesign.com.
