4 ms·

Impressive demo, but yet i can't help thinking that the "big" question still remain largely unsolved for those services. Two points : 1/ viv keeps mentioning

by bsaul 11y ago

Impressive demo, but yet i can't help thinking that the "big" question still remain largely unsolved for those services. Two points : 1/ viv keeps mentioning a "breakthrough" in computer science because they managed to create a program that will scan a network of services and fill the parameters from the query. Now, those guys aren't jokers, so i presume there is definitely something fantastic behind, yet i can't help thinking that once you've "understood" the intent, it sounds quite close to a sql / graphql query planner. 2/ Which leads to the big question : guessing the intent. Every time i hear people mention "intelligence" or "understanding", i show them this : "hey siri, please do NOT set a timer for 4 minutes, i beg you". The fact is, it's just a trick. It recognize words, but it doesn't understand anything, it doesn't have concepts, knowledge or any experience. It's a dumb program that never had any life or sense to understand anything. If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ? This is, to me, the big and interesting question that online assistants makers needs to solve. Now of course, viv is aiming for a product release this year, so they're building an intermediate solution, where developers will manually associate keywords to services, in an "easy" way. And it will sort of work. Yet i'm still waiting for the real "big" advance.

ksenzee 11y ago
To be fair, if you asked me for a good ticket for Chicago tonight, I'd be looking up first-class airfare, and asking if you had a funeral to attend. It's possible to expect too much even from humans, let alone AI.
- RBerenguel 11y ago
  But this depends on the context. We can assume that the context of bsaul is being in Paris (context is not a requirement of intelligence) and now is where some intelligent processing appears: it is very unlikely for anyone to actually want to fly so quickly, thus checking if Chicago the band is playing in Paris (or close enough) would be a reasonable try before going to a flight planner website.
- mirekrusin 11y ago
  ...it will know your location and it will know that many people got tickets for it already. I think the key here is 1) evolution - as he said it will get better with time. Just like wikipedia was discarded by many intelligent people in its infancy, similarly now it may feel not so much revolutionary - but it will become something big. And 2) modularity/good design so it's easy to add "improvement" layers. Some nodes/areas can be backed with deep AI, some don't need to. At the end you just wrap the whole thing in AI at the top to improve itself and we can slowly start calling Viv 21st century's god. ...or evil as some people will probably do. As granpa you'll tell your grandchildren how cool it was when you had to go to the market to pick flowers for your gf, now it's all automated ordering from robots growing flowers.
kbenson 11y ago
> If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ? I think you discount how often the plane ticket to Chicago might happen. On total number of requests spread across the planet, I think the plane ticket might be the more common one. The point is, we don't care about the rest of the planet, at least not nearly as much as we do about our local surroundings. The way people answer that query is by using their continually updated knowledge about the state of the local system. If the band Chicago isn't playing around your current location soon, then the correct way to interpret that query would be that you needed a plane ticket (as anyone around you would probably think). This is why I think Google is really in a better position to answer these queries, because the knowledge graph allows the context to provide the nuance you are looking for.
- bsaul 11y ago
  >This is why I think Google is really in a better position to answer these queries, because the knowledge graph allows the context to provide the nuance you are looking for. I agree completely. That's why the viv presentation left me a bit unsatisfied. I also had the exact same thought in the middle of their talk : "with google database of concepts, you could do so much more". But even Google still needs to break the last barrier, and it's related to language itself and culture. Every translator and linguistic knows that a language conveys much more than clear information. It is a mental construct that evolved during thousands of years, and keeps evolving, is full of ambiguities than only culture, experience (and a bit of common sense) can solve. The best example of this is to notice how bad automatic translators are. Guys at google tried to brute-force the problem, with a gigantic database of text, yet the result is absolutely miserable.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    > The best example of this is to notice how bad automatic translators are. Guys at google tried to brute-force the problem, with a gigantic database of text, yet the result is absolutely miserable. I suppose. I am fluent in two languages (also Spanish) so I'm in a position to be able to judge the quality of a translation, and I would say that pasting in blocks of text to translate them these days yields a result that's quite a bit better than miserable, thought indeed not flawless yet.
vr3690 11y ago
I am gonna copy paste a similar comment I made on a related thread [0]. That demo was very cool. But: 1. do we really want a centralised service for everything that has access to a lot of data within a walled garden? 2. Siri only works well with North American accents afaik (maybe all western accents?). Alexa's voice recognition is the best and I hope Viv does a similar job. 3. This is mostly a personal preference, but for online shopping I prefer using a lot of filters. This UI doesn't really help with that. Also, HN probably knows better but is the "computed plan" shown in the demo, different from an execution plan created by an RDBMS? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660916
- kbenson 11y ago
  > maybe all western accents? Apparently not[1], but I imagine it's gotten quite a bit better since then. 1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053684/Scottish-iPhone-users-lost-translation--Siri-understand-accent.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053684/Scottish-iPh...
lovamova 11y ago
That’s why AI needs to be taught like a kid.
- bobsil1 11y ago
  Body cams on kids, striped across each grade. It's the best way.
ctulek 11y ago
I don't think they are trying to answer your big question. On one hand, as mentioned in previous replies, even a human cannot just understand what you are talking about and would ask further questions, on the other hand, it is not about to try to answer all questions but to find some interesting, frequent cases that products like Viv can solve for you. Maybe we should mostly think about AI products/tools as just another (weird) friend who is good at answering certain questions for us. At the end, we don't even expect any of our friends to be able to answer all of our questions. Indeed, we pick the right friend for right question.
ndarilek 11y ago
"If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ?" Funny, your "absolutely not a chance" interpretation was mine. Maybe there was a death in the family. Maybe you need to visit a friend short notice. Maybe I'm being a bit pedantic, but I was with you until that point. :)
mortenjorck 11y ago
If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ? I don't even need an assistant system to figure out based on context which I'm talking about: All I want is one that can simply ask clarifying questions. "Did you mean Chicago the city, or Chicago the band?" I had an amusing Siri interaction a few months ago where I asked "what language is spoken in Shanghai?" (I can never remember if it's Mandarin or Cantonese). Siri came back with a very well-reasoned, completely out-of-place answer of "Hindi": https://twitter.com/claymill/status/690386752683577344 https://twitter.com/claymill/status/690386752683577344
- sohailk 11y ago
  > out-of-place answer of "Hindi" it's using wolframalpha - which interprets 'Shanghai' as a movie made in India. this is probably because it doesn't have a language field for cities but does for movies.
Animats 11y ago
"it sounds quite close to a sql / graphql query planner." It probably is. Some representation of the query goes into that module, and a strategy for answering it comes out. That's probably going to look something like what comes out of an SQL query planner, but with more references to external data sources, and possibly queries followed by more queries. You should be able to say "Viv, explain what you just did" and get back a natural language representation of that program. Then tell it what you meant. This would be a useful feature on a Bloomberg terminal.
- foobarqux 11y ago
  > This would be a useful feature on a Bloomberg terminal. Why? What type of queries can you perform on those terminals that would be useful to analyze in this way?
  - BloomMe 11y ago
    A lot of Bloomberg "data" screens (this is also true in the APIs) are also interfaces to models. So like, if you pull up a bond model, you can override and it will reprice the asset, say, or back out some other parameter. The Bloomberg interface is horrible and insane, and even relatively simple things like "ok well if I change the vol on this European equity option and you give me a new price...i still need to know which method you used to solve..." There are plenty of other models in there that use much more complex pricing algos, and it would be useful to be like "Trinomial blah blah assume vol calculated as daily variance over last 30 days"
bobsil1 11y ago
>SQL query planner Viv has to disambiguate the intent with user profile and context, normalize the schema across partner databases, rank partners which support the same verbs, build a partner system which lets them add verbs and domain-specific NL training… there's a lot of grunt to make it work.
gregn610 11y ago
I was expecting theater tickets http://chicagothemusical.com/ http://chicagothemusical.com/

by bsaul 11y ago

ksenzee 11y ago

To be fair, if you asked me for a good ticket for Chicago tonight, I'd be looking up first-class airfare, and asking if you had a funeral to attend. It's possible to expect too much even from humans, let alone AI.

RBerenguel 11y ago
But this depends on the context. We can assume that the context of bsaul is being in Paris (context is not a requirement of intelligence) and now is where some intelligent processing appears: it is very unlikely for anyone to actually want to fly so quickly, thus checking if Chicago the band is playing in Paris (or close enough) would be a reasonable try before going to a flight planner website.
mirekrusin 11y ago
...it will know your location and it will know that many people got tickets for it already. I think the key here is 1) evolution - as he said it will get better with time. Just like wikipedia was discarded by many intelligent people in its infancy, similarly now it may feel not so much revolutionary - but it will become something big. And 2) modularity/good design so it's easy to add "improvement" layers. Some nodes/areas can be backed with deep AI, some don't need to. At the end you just wrap the whole thing in AI at the top to improve itself and we can slowly start calling Viv 21st century's god. ...or evil as some people will probably do. As granpa you'll tell your grandchildren how cool it was when you had to go to the market to pick flowers for your gf, now it's all automated ordering from robots growing flowers.

kbenson 11y ago

> If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ? I think you discount how often the plane ticket to Chicago might happen. On total number of requests spread across the planet, I think the plane ticket might be the more common one. The point is, we don't care about the rest of the planet, at least not nearly as much as we do about our local surroundings. The way people answer that query is by using their continually updated knowledge about the state of the local system. If the band Chicago isn't playing around your current location soon, then the correct way to interpret that query would be that you needed a plane ticket (as anyone around you would probably think). This is why I think Google is really in a better position to answer these queries, because the knowledge graph allows the context to provide the nuance you are looking for.

bsaul 11y ago
>This is why I think Google is really in a better position to answer these queries, because the knowledge graph allows the context to provide the nuance you are looking for. I agree completely. That's why the viv presentation left me a bit unsatisfied. I also had the exact same thought in the middle of their talk : "with google database of concepts, you could do so much more". But even Google still needs to break the last barrier, and it's related to language itself and culture. Every translator and linguistic knows that a language conveys much more than clear information. It is a mental construct that evolved during thousands of years, and keeps evolving, is full of ambiguities than only culture, experience (and a bit of common sense) can solve. The best example of this is to notice how bad automatic translators are. Guys at google tried to brute-force the problem, with a gigantic database of text, yet the result is absolutely miserable.
- CPLX 11y ago
  > The best example of this is to notice how bad automatic translators are. Guys at google tried to brute-force the problem, with a gigantic database of text, yet the result is absolutely miserable. I suppose. I am fluent in two languages (also Spanish) so I'm in a position to be able to judge the quality of a translation, and I would say that pasting in blocks of text to translate them these days yields a result that's quite a bit better than miserable, thought indeed not flawless yet.

vr3690 11y ago

I am gonna copy paste a similar comment I made on a related thread [0]. That demo was very cool. But: 1. do we really want a centralised service for everything that has access to a lot of data within a walled garden? 2. Siri only works well with North American accents afaik (maybe all western accents?). Alexa's voice recognition is the best and I hope Viv does a similar job. 3. This is mostly a personal preference, but for online shopping I prefer using a lot of filters. This UI doesn't really help with that. Also, HN probably knows better but is the "computed plan" shown in the demo, different from an execution plan created by an RDBMS? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660916

kbenson 11y ago
> maybe all western accents? Apparently not[1], but I imagine it's gotten quite a bit better since then. 1: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053684/Scottish-iPhone-users-lost-translation--Siri-understand-accent.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053684/Scottish-iPh...

lovamova 11y ago

That’s why AI needs to be taught like a kid.

bobsil1 11y ago
Body cams on kids, striped across each grade. It's the best way.

ctulek 11y ago

I don't think they are trying to answer your big question. On one hand, as mentioned in previous replies, even a human cannot just understand what you are talking about and would ask further questions, on the other hand, it is not about to try to answer all questions but to find some interesting, frequent cases that products like Viv can solve for you. Maybe we should mostly think about AI products/tools as just another (weird) friend who is good at answering certain questions for us. At the end, we don't even expect any of our friends to be able to answer all of our questions. Indeed, we pick the right friend for right question.

ndarilek 11y ago

"If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ?" Funny, your "absolutely not a chance" interpretation was mine. Maybe there was a death in the family. Maybe you need to visit a friend short notice. Maybe I'm being a bit pedantic, but I was with you until that point. :)

mortenjorck 11y ago

If i say "find me a good ticket for Chicago tonight". How will it know that i'm talking about the rock band that's playing tonight in Paris, France, since there's absolutely not a chance that a human being asks for a plane ticket for such a big trip just a few hours in advance ? I don't even need an assistant system to figure out based on context which I'm talking about: All I want is one that can simply ask clarifying questions. "Did you mean Chicago the city, or Chicago the band?" I had an amusing Siri interaction a few months ago where I asked "what language is spoken in Shanghai?" (I can never remember if it's Mandarin or Cantonese). Siri came back with a very well-reasoned, completely out-of-place answer of "Hindi": https://twitter.com/claymill/status/690386752683577344 https://twitter.com/claymill/status/690386752683577344

sohailk 11y ago
> out-of-place answer of "Hindi" it's using wolframalpha - which interprets 'Shanghai' as a movie made in India. this is probably because it doesn't have a language field for cities but does for movies.

Animats 11y ago

"it sounds quite close to a sql / graphql query planner." It probably is. Some representation of the query goes into that module, and a strategy for answering it comes out. That's probably going to look something like what comes out of an SQL query planner, but with more references to external data sources, and possibly queries followed by more queries. You should be able to say "Viv, explain what you just did" and get back a natural language representation of that program. Then tell it what you meant. This would be a useful feature on a Bloomberg terminal.

foobarqux 11y ago
> This would be a useful feature on a Bloomberg terminal. Why? What type of queries can you perform on those terminals that would be useful to analyze in this way?
- BloomMe 11y ago
  A lot of Bloomberg "data" screens (this is also true in the APIs) are also interfaces to models. So like, if you pull up a bond model, you can override and it will reprice the asset, say, or back out some other parameter. The Bloomberg interface is horrible and insane, and even relatively simple things like "ok well if I change the vol on this European equity option and you give me a new price...i still need to know which method you used to solve..." There are plenty of other models in there that use much more complex pricing algos, and it would be useful to be like "Trinomial blah blah assume vol calculated as daily variance over last 30 days"

bobsil1 11y ago

>SQL query planner Viv has to disambiguate the intent with user profile and context, normalize the schema across partner databases, rank partners which support the same verbs, build a partner system which lets them add verbs and domain-specific NL training… there's a lot of grunt to make it work.

gregn610 11y ago

I was expecting theater tickets http://chicagothemusical.com/ http://chicagothemusical.com/