Interactive Voice Ads + Voice Shopping With Walmart
I spend a lot of my time trying to understand how to design a truly conversational AI, and I’m typically knee-deep in some news or a research paper or a machine learning tutorial or maybe a YouTube video. BTW most of my on-the-fly research I share on my Twitter account as I discover it so feel free to follow me there too.
I reached a simple conclusion. It’s probably obvious for most of you, but, the reality is, that a fully human-like, general-purpose AI isn’t actually what we need or what most of the time. There, I said it. General-purpose conversational AI is folly.
Conversational AI will always work better when you have a goal, even if it’s high-level or slightly vague (in fact, I’d argue conversational AI is the best for that). Here are some examples of goal that are uniquely suited for conversational AI. That is, that today cannot be effectively be addressed by traditional software.
- 👬Counter loneliness by having a digital companion you can trust
- 😷Get specific well-being advice to help you build mental resilience over time
- 👟Help you get exercise by making it more focused and enjoyable by having a digital coach to be there in your ear as you run or do other exercise
- 🗣Negotiate with real people on your behalf against some set parameters by having a digital concierge converse with the other parties (who, let’s face it, may be bots themselves!)
Collectively we’re calling these entities digital beings, software or devices that you build relationships with over time. They already play a role in society, and one of the topics we cover at CogX is what that role is today for hundreds of millions of people around the world, and hearing from experts about what that can be. I can’t wait to share some of the experts on conversational AI we have lined up to speak. It’s going to be epic.
Best,
Julian Harris
Leading the Pack
Pandora to start testing interactive voice ads
The music streaming service is planning to test interactive ads that are designed to encourage responses from listeners. So, for example, an ad describing a new smartphone could ask the listener if they want to learn more about it, or which particular feature sounds the most interesting.
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Making an Impact
“Hey Google, talk to Walmart”
Walmart will now let customers order groceries by voice through Google’s smart-home assistant, in an attempt to counter Amazon’s growing clout in e-commerce. You can ask it for more than one thing at once too — something Amazon doesn’t yet do.
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Learn from the Pros
What is a Conversational Designer?
The jobs, they are a-changing. With the rise of AI for speech and text comes a need of specialists who can program computers to speak like humans and understand them as well. Enter the Conversational Designer and other interesting roles.
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Under the Hood
Embedding extremely large graphs
Check out PyTorch-BigGraph (PBG), a new tool from Facebook AI Research that enables graph embeddings for very large graphs (with billions of nodes and trillions of edges) without specialised computing resources.
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Chinese AI beats humans on SQuAD 2.0
SQuAD 2.0 is a way to measure how good your conversational AI is for extracting answers from a body of text (not a list of question/answer pairs). It also tells you if it can be answered (that’s what 2.0 offers over 1.1).
This was a few weeks ago, but it may have slipped through your radar (it did ours!). Chinese AI company iFLYTEK has bested the SQuAD2.0 challenge once again. The model “BERT + DAE + AoA” submitted by the joint iFLYTEK Research and HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) laboratory HFL outperformed humans on both EM (exact match) and F1-score (fuzzy match) indexes to top the SQuAD2.0 leaderboard.
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