Waiting for Universal Digital Assistants

Waiting for Universal Digital Assistants

Many of us remember the first time we used a voice assistant like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant.?

The initial approach, using basic phrases and mundane requests, felt somewhat awkward when communicating with an internet-connected machine in front of friends and family, especially since such interactions are typically reserved for fellow humans.?

The initial high expectations were extinguished almost immediately, as soon as we realized that the results that could be achieved, especially with the first versions of these devices, were very limited: trivial tasks such as setting a timer or an alarm clock, inserting an item in a shopping list, putting on some music or, in more advanced cases, controlling some home automation device such as switching on a light bulb or opening a gate.?

In communicating with the machine, we have also realized something interesting: the machine often does not understand us, so we, over time, have learned to speak in a way that is more comprehensible to the machine itself: using minimal sentences, articulating words well and inserting pauses at the right point. In other words: we have adapted to the machine by impoverishing our language, not the machine that over time has learnt to communicate better with us. A compromise due to the limitations of technology, but still a compromise that we look forward to overcoming.

The good news is that most of these limitations are about to be overcome thanks to the advent of Universal Digital Assistants in the near future.

Imagine having a kind of personal digital butler at our disposal, to be called when we need information, when we want to book a service, when we need a generic task done. An assistant capable of solving our problems, organizing our agenda, providing us with the entertainment that suits us when we feel like it, simplifying our work, suggesting how to answer an email, when to get up for a walk or when to stay focused on our tasks.?

This, and much more, is what awaits us as soon as traditional voice assistant technology will be integrated with comprehension and content generation functionalities, and this new ecosystem will be integrated with external train, hotel and restaurant reservation services, weather services, local events and all those services that we can access today in an analogue or digital way.

When these tools will be available we can safely ask one of these assistants: 'Book me trains, hotels and restaurants in a city of art for one of the upcoming weekends when the weather is good and there is something to see that I haven't seen yet. The whole family is coming", with the reasonable assurance that all tasks will be done properly.

These universal assistants will be totally personal because they will learn from our habits in order to serve us in the best way, in the first phase of their use they could make mistakes or ask for confirmation on how to behave in certain situations, but later, as they learn, they will become more and more reliable, just as a human assistant would, improving over time their ability to meet our needs.

These learning skills will also be able to understand the detail we want to be informed about news, personal emails, professional communications or entertainment content.

A full understanding of natural language will be reinforced by a full understanding of the context in which we will be. Saying a simple 'Tell them I'll be five minutes late' may mean telling the person who is waiting for us at the restaurant, or the team with whom we have our next call, or even the hairdresser with whom we have an appointment. Understanding the context will be an indispensable feature to make these machines work at their best.?

One of the features available from the first versions will undoubtedly be the ability to translate in natural language from one language to another, thus also becoming our personal interpreters in real time, enabling us to break down language barriers.

Today, the modest virtual assistants we have at our disposal are located in dedicated devices, think for instance of Alexa who 'lives' inside Amazon's Echo devices. However, we have some of these services already available in our smartphone or watch. Our universal digital assistant will be 'everywhere' in the sense that it will be available in any device close to us and will always be synchronized and operational for us. This functionality will be the real killer application of a new generation of smart glasses that, in addition to augmented reality features, will also have our universal digital assistant on board.

Integration with the rest of the world will initially be limited, but soon service providers will be competing to integrate with these new assistants. Refusing integration, or delaying it, will mean giving up a privileged sales channel for content and services, a channel that could soon become the main one.?

The ability to search for information will take a huge step forward compared to what we can get from classical virtual assistants today: algorithms will be able to search for information in real time from different and reliable sources, providing us with up-to-date and accurate answers. However, this should not make us give up our critical sense and our ability to select sources and news; we should not go from today's 'I read it on the internet' to 'Alexa told me so'.

We should not only expect answers to our requests, but also proactive attitudes that will stimulate us to live better, from a simple "your train leaves in half an hour, it is good to leave so as not to arrive late and risk missing it" to more articulate and intimate things such as "you won't be home tonight, maybe you should start packing your suitcase for tomorrow", up to motivational functions or attention to our health such as "with your cholesterol at 200 those pastries would be better avoided, how about a piece of fruit?” Many of these things may seem like an invasion of our personal sphere today, but tomorrow they could be very useful for some of us.

Some people will feel so comfortable talking to these digital assistants that they will start to have feelings for them, to the point of falling in love with them or to the point of confessing their innermost secrets to them, trusting the confidentiality guaranteed by the service provider.?

To the invasion of the personal sphere will be added the issues of security and the protection of personal data, issues that should not be overlooked and should be well analyzed before putting devices on the market that are not completely secure. As users, we will always have to ask ourselves who we will give our data to, what data it will be about, and how this data will be managed, always remembering that if the service is free, our data will probably be the money to pay for it.?

What is certain is that our lives will change radically, we will have assistants capable of performing so many tasks for us, but we will have to be very good at realizing that no matter how good they are at having a conversation with us, they will still only be machines.?

The future is full of transformative changes in the way we work, travel, consume information, maintain our health, shop, and interact with others.

My latest book, "Augmented Lives" explores innovation and emerging technologies and their impact on our lives.

Available in all editions and formats starting from here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTRTDGK5