Voice Bots: Most Human Computers We’ve Ever Had.

Also: The Cheapest Computers We’ve Ever Had.

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The most reliable way to determine if an entity can be deemed artificially intelligent is through Turing Test. It involves computers being able to consistently “fool” human testers into believing that they are talking to a human through a conversational messaging interface.

The idea is that the use of language is the most advanced use of human intelligence and if computers can do that as good as a human, they should be considered intelligent.

Alan Turing proposed the chat setup to take out the visual aspect so machines don’t have to look like humans to be considered intelligent.

There’s a reason we place so much importance on language.

Language happens to be the most nuanced way we can produce and transfer information. We are really, really good at it. It’s what makes us human. We can express abstract concepts or convey variety of information by changing our tone, choice of words, pitch etc. We spend years perfecting the use of language but until recently, our computers were too basic to understand even simple natural language instructions.

Computers may not be sentient yet. Though today they can be taught to understand natural language using machine learning, with trained artificial neural nets. If you want to dive deeper into this new technology, you can read my “Learning at Scale & The End of ‘If-Then’ Logic” article.

In short, thanks to rapid standardization in deep learning technology, powered by cheap cloud computing we are seeing massive growth of a new interactive software medium: voice bots.

Bots are applications with a conversational, natural language interface.

Bots interact like humans and since we already know natural language, there is no learning curve to use them for us. You interact with a bot like you’d interact with a fellow human.

Talking to bots using voice is a very “human” experience. It feels as if you’re talking to someone over the phone. You hear the voice and your mind imagines the rest. A large group of Alexa users reported that they like to say “Thank you, Alexa” after Alexa completes a task.

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick in his epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, portrayed human interaction with the super intelligence alien AI — HAL 9000 — only through voice. Because that’s all that we need.