Are Chat Bots a Passing Episode or Here to Stay?

Chat bots are everywhere. It feels like the early days of mobile apps where you either knew someone who is building an app or many others planning to do so. Chat bots have their magic. It’s a frictionless interface allowing you to naturally chat with someone. The main difference is that on the other side there is a machine and not a person. Still, one as old as I got to think whether it is the end game in terms of human machine interaction or are they just another evolutionary step in the long path of human machine interactions.

How Did We Get Here?

I’ve noticed chat bots for quite a while and it piqued my curiosity in terms of the possible use cases as well as the underlying architecture. What interests me more is Facebook and other AI superpowers ambitions towards them. And chat bots are indeed a next step in terms of human machine communications. We all know where history began when we initially had to communicate via a command line interface limited by a very strict vocabulary of commands. An interface that was reserved for the computer geeks alone. The next evolutionary step was the big wave of graphical user interfaces. Initially the ugly ones but later on in major leaps of improvements making the user experience smooth as possible but still bounded by the available options and actions in a specific context in a specific application. Alongside graphical user interfaces we were introduced to search like interfaces where there is a mix of a graphical user interface elements with a command line input which allows extended textual interaction  – here the GUI serves as a navigation tool primarily. And then some other new human machine interfaces were introduced, each one evolving on its own track: the voice interface, the gesture interface (usually hands) and the VR interface. Each one of these interaction paradigms uses different human senses and body parts to express communications onto the machine where the machine can understand you to a certain extent and communicate back. And now we have the chat bots and there’s something about them which is different. In a way it’s the first time you can express yourself freely via texting and the machine will understand your intentions and desires. That’s the premise. It does not mean each chat bot is able to respond on every request as chat bots are confined to the logic that was programmed to them but from a language barrier point of view a new peak has been reached.

So do we experience now the end of the road for human machine interactions?  Last week I’ve met a special women, named Zohar Urian (the lucky hebrew readers can enjoy her super smart blog about creative, innovation, marketing and lots of other cool stuff) and she said that voice will be next which makes a lot of sense. Voice has less friction then typing, its popularity in messaging is only growing and technology progress is almost there in terms of allowing free vocal express where a machine can understand it. Zohar’s sentence echoed in my brain which made me go deeper into understanding the anatomy of the human machine interfaces evolution. 

The Evolution of Human-Machine Interfaces 

The progress in human to machine interactions has evolutionary patterns. Every new paradigm is building on capabilities from the previous paradigm and eventually the rule of survivor of the fittest plays a big role where the winning capabilities survive and evolve. Thinking about its very natural to evolve this way as the human factor in this evolution is the dominating one. Every change in this evolution can be decomposed into four dominating factors:

1. The brain or the intelligence within the machine – the intelligence which contains the logic available to the human but also the capabilities that define the semantics and boundaries of communications.
2. The communications protocol which is provided by the machine such as the ability to decipher audio into words and sentences hence enabling voice interaction.
3. The way the human is communicating with the machine which has tight coupling with the machine communication protocol but represents the complementary role.
4. The human brain.

The holy 4 factors

Machine Brain <->

Machine Protocol <->

Human Protocol <->

Human Brain

In each paradigm shift there was a change in one or more factors:

Observations

There are several phenomenons and observations from this semi structured analysis:

• The usage of combination of communication protocols such as voice and VR will extend the range of communications between human and machines even without changing anything in the computer brain.
• Within time more and more human senses and physical interactions are available for computers to understand which extend the boundaries of communications. Up until today smell has not gone mainstream as well as touching. Pretty sure we will see them in the near term future.
• The human brain always stays the same. Furthermore, the rest of the chain always strives to match into the human brain capabilities. It can be viewed as a funnel limiting the human brain from fully expressing itself digitally and within time it gets wider.
• An interesting question is whether at some point in time the human brain will get stronger if the communications to machines will be with no boundaries and AI will be stronger. 
• We did not witness yet any serious leap which removed one of the elements in the chain and that I would call a revolutionary step (still behaving in an evolutionary manner). Maybe the identification of brain waves and real-time translation to a protocol understandable by a machine will be as such. Removing the need for translating the thoughts into some intermediate medium. 
• Once the machine brain becomes smarter in each evolutionary step then the magnitude of expression grows bigger – so the there is a progress even without creating more expressive communication protocol.
• Chat bots from a communications point of view in a way are a jump back to the initial protocol of command line though the magnitude of the smartness of the machine brains nowadays make it a different thing. So it is really about the progress of AI and not chat bots.
  
  I may have missed some interfaces, apologies, not an expert in that area:)

Now to The Answer

So the answer to the main question – chat bots indeed represent a big step in terms of streamlining natural language processing for identifying user intentions in writing. In combination with the fact that users favourite method of communication nowadays is texting makes it a powerful progress. Still the main thing that thrills here is the AI development and that is sustainable across all communication protocols. So in simple words it is just an addition to the arsenal of communication protocols between human and machines but we are far from seeing the end of this evolution. From the FB and Google point of view these are new interfaces to their AI capabilities which makes them stronger every day thanks to increased usage.

Food for Thought

if one conscious AI meets another conscious AI in cyber space will they be communicate via text or voice or something else?