Gartner, a leading research firm, issued a list of the ten top strategic technology trends for 2014. By strategic they mean that these are developments that are getting a lot of attention and development in the industry, not necessarily that these developments will come to full fruition in 2014. One of the items on the list was ‘smart machines’ and under that category they included self-driving cars, smart advisors like IBM’s Watson and advanced global industrial systems, which are automated factories.
But I want to look at the other item on their list which is contextually aware intelligent personal assistants. This essentially will be Apple’s Siri on steroids. This is expected to be done at first mostly using cell phones or other mobile device. Eventually one would think that this will migrate towards something like Google Glass, a smart phone, a bracelet or some other way to have this always on you.
Probably the key part of the descriptive phrase is contextual. To be useful, a person’s personal assistant has to learn and understand the way they talk and live in order to become completely personalized to them. By contextual, the current Siri needs to grow to learn things by observation. To be the life-changing assistant envisioned by Gartner is going to require software that can learn to anticipate what you want. For example, as you are talking to a certain person your assistant ought to be able to pick out of the conversation those bits and pieces that you are going to want it to remember. For example, somebody may tell you their favorite restaurant or favorite beer and you would want your assistant to remember that without you telling it to do so.
Both Apple and Microsoft’s current personal assistants have already taken the first big step in the process in that they are able to converse some in conversation language mode. Compare what today’s assistants can already do to Google’s search engine, which makes you type in awkward phrases. Any assistant is going to have to be able to be completely fluent in a person’s language.
One can easily envision a personal assistant for life that helps you learn when you are young and who then sticks with you for life. Such an assistant will literally become the most important ‘person’ in somebody’s life. An effective assistant can free a person from many of the mundane tasks of life. You will never get lost, have to make an appointment, remember somebody’s birthday or do many of the routine things that are part of life today. A good assistant will free you from the mundane. But it still won’t take out the trash, although it can have your house-bot do that.
In the future you can envision this assistant tied into the Internet of things so it would be the one device you give orders to. It would then translate and talk to all of your other systems. It would talk to your smart house, talk to your self-driving car, talk to the system that is monitoring your health, etc.
The biggest issue with this kind of personal assistant is going to be privacy. A true life-assistant is going to know every good and bad thing about you, including your health problems and every one of your ugly bad habits. It is going to be essential that this kind of system stay completely private and be somehow immune to hacking. Nobody can trust an assistant in their life that others can hack or peer into.
One might think that this is something on the distant horizon, but there are many industry experts who think this is probably the first thing on the smart machine list that will come to pass, and that there will be pretty decent versions of this within the next decade. Siri is already a great first step, although often completely maddening. But as this kind of software improves it is not hard to picture this becoming something that you can’t live without. It will be a big transition for older people, but our children will take to this intuitively.