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AI assistant

It'southward now fairly clear what tech pundits like Andrew Rubin hateful when they say Artificial Intelligence will be the operating system of the future – that is, some kind of omnipresent, all listening entity that will live inside our cars, houses and prison cell phones, taking orders and answering questions (all the while vacuuming up every last shred of privacy we thought we had left).  Already, nascent forms of this tin can be seen in the likes of Amazon'southward Alexa, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana. As if the infinite wasn't crowded enough, now the Chinese search giant Baidu is throwing its hat in the ring with a newly minted AI assistant/platform called DuerOS. Let's pop the hood and see what's behind DuerOS and where it is likely to take the field.

self driving car

Baidu's self driving car, just i of the many devices slated to run DuerOS. Image Courtesy CNN Money

The start affair to understand about the next wave of AI administration, which includes DuerOS, is they will be device agnostic. That is, they will live in the deject and follow us from device to device, seamlessly syncing across time and space. If this doesn't give y'all evil nightmares of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey , information technology probably should, considering reading lips will likely exist simply one of the many "superpowers" these AI assistants possess. For anyone with an android smartphone, Google probably already knows more about your recent history than you do! Incertitude this, only check out your Google Timeline or Search History for a creepy, dystopian, stroll down memory lane. But the AI assistant to rule them all will be the 1 best positioned to brand sense of these breadcrumbs left behind when we search the internet or enable location tracking on our cell phones, and thereby anticipate our actions and desires.

For this reason DuerOS has an immediate advantage over some of the competitors. Baidu has 1 billion gadget hungry Chinese already using its search engine, providing it with an enormous amount of data for its AI to sift through and "train upon". They also have direct access to many of the device manufacturers which are located in Mainland china, making adoption by hardware firms potentially more than swift. Already Baidu is in conversation with some pinnacle speaker manufactures to pursue incorporating DuerOS into audio devices, ala Alexa.  However, going forrard in that location volition be a number of challenges to be surmounted, some particular to DuerOS and others faced by the entire field.

To my mind, the biggest problem of all is that the entire AI assistant category smells like a solution in search of a problem.  Many of these assistants experience like tech wizardry dreamed up by  Silicon Valley nerds that offer little in the way of solar day to day utility. Telling Amazon Alexa to turn on your living room lights isn't that different from The Clapper lite of the 1980's, for the simple reason that unless the voice recognition works flawlessly, and let me tell you it currently doesn't, than it is easier just to get up and plough on the light yourself than await for Alexa to effigy out what you've been shouting at her. In the end what is envisioned every bit an improvement becomes some other manner to drain and frustrate us. Sadly so many in Silicon Valley fail to realize that there is a limit to how many ways you can slice a person's attending among different gadgets and operating systems earlier they deliquesce into a gibbering pool of nervous indecision.

DuerOS will not only take to find a solid utilise case beyond turning on lights and adjusting speaker volumes, it will need to somehow penetrate the English speaking market which is already saturated with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. And so while Baidu clearly has 1000 visions for its newly minted Bone, it will accept to prove it can run with the big dogs before it deserves more than a passing glance.