El Reg drills into chatbot hype: The AIs that want to be your web butlers

Dystopian future

The more I hear about the possible uses of AI, the more I think the future will be like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNw95c75g7o

Everything is Advertising

The software analyzes the content of chatter to recognize what and when to advertise, and it's an obvious step towards monetizing chatbots.

I should have realised...

Two Ronnies

I'd like to see a chatbot that could follow an episode of the Two Ronnies without getting confused. A 'Turing Test' for chatbots maybe?

Unreal

It helps to train your model on large datasets containing real conversations such as online forums or movie scripts.

Few of those could be described as real conversations. What they've done is chosen texts they can scrape, where someone else has already done the effort-intensive work of typing for them.

Metrics

"For a while, Apple had the lead with Siri: ..."

How was this determined? Specifications, measurements, standardised test procedures, etc ? Does anybody know what we want/need from a 'chatbot' and why?

Alexa:

How can the workers seize the means of production?

I was quite interested in the Echo...

So I stumped up £50 for a Dot and quickly found out that it is a pile of crap. It doesn't recognise half of what I ask it unless I talk to it like an utter simpleton, and only then if my question or request is worded in the way its algorithms are designed to process the input. Subsequently it has now been gathering dust on my kitchen shelf since before christmas - unplugged I might add.

I have better bots that respond much better and will always remain totally ad free - they are the wife and kids.

Is this what you meant?

"Rather than pull up your favorite news website, you'll simply ask out loud to your phone or speaker: what's happening in Linux today?"

ps -ef|more

"It’s a trillion-dollar industry"

Right off the bat that sounds suspiciously like the evaluations of the cost of virii or hacking, or pirate downloads.

Did someone ask RIAA for their evaluation on the subject ?

That said, I can imagine that getting into this industry, when it forms, will cost a pretty penny, but come on, AI doesn't exist and it didn't cost a trillion dollars (or bring that much money in) to launch Siri or Cortana or even both at the same time.

Tired of the hyperbole. Time to retire to the mountains and dig that gorram bear pit.

Picky, picky, and irrelevant:

'"But it’s still the beginning of the race so the jury’s still out,” Etzioni added.'

In other news, Secretariat was convicted of stalling by a jury of his peers, and given the horse-laugh.

Siri

"What's happening in Linux today?"

"Finally its on the desktop."

"the fact that speech recognition systems perform slightly better than professional transcriptionists"

Has any one seen the subtitles on BBC News? They soooo funny at getting things wrong.

Two letter acronyms are going to fail...

3D? Failed in the 50s, and failed again in the naughties.

VR? About to fail.

AI? Lots more fail before it gets any better. And by better, I mean developed for an actual use by someone who's not trying to cleverly feed me an advert on a chunk of plastic, sand, and metal that I paid for already.

When I can pick up my device, look through the camera lens and have it augment actual useful info, rather than every coffee shop in a 100 mile radius, THEN we might be getting close to something useful.

I've had Siri for about a year. I used it once and now just set my own appointments with the iCloud apps directly. When it can do more than just offer simple suggestions, or unhelpful ones like "would you like me to search the web for that?" it would be ready for everyday use. I can't imagine what the lesser two voicebots are talking about, nor do I want to know. They are all lacking.

If your single and/or home alone or have your own office then talking to a bot to get info might make sense.

For the rest of the world what bloody use are they?

too much to ask?

Chatbots/personal assistant will reach usable level when able to process and execute the following request "hey you, turn yourself off and get the f...out of my way".

Why?

This whole thing seems like such a bizarrely flawed idea.

Computers are computers. People are people. Conversation is a communication method for people, it's not a communication method for computers. Does anyone actually *want* to have a 'chat' with a computer? Does anyone actually *want* to 'build a rapport' with one? Am I way off base here and everyone else really is just waiting for the day when they have to keep up a witty and amusing back-and-forth with their house AI every day just to get at the goddamn news? I dunno, I feel like I must be missing something here.

The one thing that is ignored or maybe not understood by all this brain and computer power is the simple need for personalization, and I mean "simple". Users need to take possession of the thing by being able to name it themselves. As long as it is "allo" or "Siri" or "Echo" ot any other trademarked name, it belongs to the company that created it. If people are to integrate it into their lives, naming it delineates the type of ownership people want for something to become so intimate a part of their lives. What's the first thing we learn when we meet someone new? If people see that our chatbot/AI is effective/useful, they will ask us for the source.