7 ms·

Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type

Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does. Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.

jff 15y ago
The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away" :)
- ebiester 15y ago
  We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.) We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz. I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition! The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon. Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing. Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing. Watson has superb accuracy. The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer. Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times. True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present. And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least. For my kids, probably not so much.
    - jshort 15y ago
      Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
    - ebiester 15y ago
      "True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it. My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
- wslh 15y ago
  But wasn't HAL ready on 2001?
  - alanh 15y ago
    Sorry for the off-topic, but you’ve seen that HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED is one of the error codes 2011 builds of Windows 8 spit out? http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y
    - wslh 15y ago
      But HAL in that context is "Hardware Abstraction Layer.
_delirium 15y ago
Heck, some of his comments to the device are vague enough that a typical human wouldn't be 100% sure what the desired information is.
mindstab 15y ago
also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple
- _delirium 15y ago
  And Siri in turn was more or less a commercialization-oriented spinoff of this DARPA-funded project from SRI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO

jff 15y ago

The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away" :)

ebiester 15y ago
We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.) We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz. I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition! The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon. Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing. Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing. Watson has superb accuracy. The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer. Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times. True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present. And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least. For my kids, probably not so much.
  - jshort 15y ago
    Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
  - ebiester 15y ago
    "True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it. My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
wslh 15y ago
But wasn't HAL ready on 2001?
- alanh 15y ago
  Sorry for the off-topic, but you’ve seen that HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED is one of the error codes 2011 builds of Windows 8 spit out? http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y
  - wslh 15y ago
    But HAL in that context is "Hardware Abstraction Layer.

_delirium 15y ago

Heck, some of his comments to the device are vague enough that a typical human wouldn't be 100% sure what the desired information is.

mindstab 15y ago

also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple

_delirium 15y ago
And Siri in turn was more or less a commercialization-oriented spinoff of this DARPA-funded project from SRI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO