Intelligent virtual assistants: the next frontier
Facebook has just launched Facebook M, an intelligent virtual assistant that joins an environment in which all the big technologies are now competing: Apple with Siri, Google with Google Now, along with a wide range of algorithms and devices that include automatically created photographs or advice of all kind, such as Microsoft’s Cortana, or Amazon’s Echo. We’re talking here about a very well defined trend that is already having major repercussions.
Competition in this sphere could make the world a much more interesting place, as companies pursue different strategies and rethink things radically. From simply making some tasks easier (“advise me on this”, “call this person”, or “find me an answer to this question”, to more creative jobs (“you took these photographs and I have assembled them into this other one”, or “I have taken the photos of your trip, I have mounted them with music and transitions, and here’s the resume”), or suggestions using data based on your habits (“this product could interest you”).
There are any number of interesting initiatives underway, such as developing ecosystems that work as third-party platforms, combining data extracted from different sources, incorporating other devices than the smartphone to centralize these functions, or combining artificial intelligence algorithms with human decision-making models working as a service. These are strategies that in the final analysis aim to persuade us to use them sustainably, beyond the appeal of the new that we might talk about with friends.
But it’s not going to be plain sailing: it’s a fine line between being impressed by the abilities of a virtual assistant and worried at what it can do. Allowing this agent to manage our information to create recommendations also has huge implications for privacy. Google Now can take data from my diary, combine it with traffic information and send me an alert recommending I leave the house early for my meeting because there is a traffic jam along my route: some people will have concerns that their lives are being taken over and that artificial intelligence holds more threat than promise.
It’s very likely that at some point in the near future, Facebook will have to answer questions about the implications of a virtual assistant that will have access not just to information generated by other software such as Google Now, or monitor what we buy, but all the information we’ve shared on the social networks, and that said assistant will end up knowing us better than ourselves.
In other words, if we want to take full advantage of the potential of this kind of artificial intelligence, we’re going to have to consider the legal implications: that is indeed an extremely interesting and thought-provoking scenario for law students looking for some excitement!
Competition is going to be fierce for the favors of clients in a sector where more and more tasks are assigned to assistants that will feed their deep learning with data and responses generated by their own actions. It’s not such as futurist scenario, and is being created in many cases through relatively trivial tasks, or those linked to entertainment, and that reveals a strategy that goes much, much further. The consequences of all this can only be positive.
(En español, aquí)
