Google’s recent victory against top-ranked Go player Lee Sedol marks another milestone in artificial intelligence development, and though this might be considered “old” news by today’s standard, it’s still a fresh achievement for the AI world.

As much as this gameboard conflict between man and machine has encouraged conversation about competition, it has also sparked increasing conversation around the potential collaborative possibilities. Toby Manning, Treasurer of the British Go Association, reveals his prediction in an interview with Nature News:

“I think the main reaction from the Go community will be, as indeed happened after IBM computer Deep Blue achieved grandmaster status in chess, is that people want to get hold of the software and use it in their own games to work out where they went wrong."

This kind of industry-specific technology has the potential to be used to further thinking, strategy, and goals within the game; however, Google’s Go algorithm still can't manage a daycare or compose a nostalgic sonnet—and there are still many tasks best done by human beings. By utilizing and combining the individual strengths of both humans and AI, the collaborative possibilities are limitless, and are quickly becoming applicable in much more than board games.



Recently interviewed on the TechEmergence podcast was Dr. James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Hendler maintains that “the key idea is that humans are the ones who can do better pattern recognition; the computer is much better at figuring out things like, ‘is this person lying or doing a good job’.”

As it turns out, there are several recent examples of people working with AI to do a better job than either could do so alone.

Gaming

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a popular new multiplayer online game where one player is required to diffuse a bomb while the other player reads instructions from a manual. The catch here is that neither player can see the other’s screen. The only way to win is by relaying instructions via voice commands. Developer Devan Hurst saw the collaborative potential of artificial intelligence for this game, leading him to create Charlie, an AI speech recognition bot. Their match, featured below, parallels Manning’s prediction for artificial intelligence in the Go community. Devan and Charlie meticulously work together to defuse the bomb using details and specific voice commands.

This online game example hints at the potential benefit of an AI assistant that collaborates with human beings to help in all sorts of jobs, from architecture to graphic design to fixing jet engines.

Healthcare

Google’s DeepMind Health project explores the collaborative potential of technology and healthcare workers in the UK. Google teamed up with the UK’s National Health Service to test and develop two new platforms, Streams and Hark. The DeepMind web page notes that “frontline nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals who spend their days treating patients know better than anyone what's needed to provide outstanding care. We at DeepMind Health aim to support clinicians by providing the technical expertise needed to build and scale technologies that help them provide the best possible care to their patients.”

A common thread is that humans and artificial intelligence perform best when they work together. As both natural language capabilities and data continue to grow, so will the applications and industries that implement conversational commerce, a term coined by Chris Messina, current developer experience Lead at Uber and former Google developer advocate. Messina defined this term in an interview with the Observer as “largely pertain[ing] to utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.”

Personal Assistants

AI personal assistants are becoming more useful as time and technology progress. Technologies such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa have for many become part of an everyday routine. There are new emerging technologies emerging that are pushing the envelope of software capability and usability in new areas. Specifically, x.ai’s ‘Amy’ and Viv (from Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus).

X.ai aims to solve the problem of finding meeting times in a busy schedule by using ‘Amy’, which as it turns out, is a combination of artificial intelligence and humans.These ‘AI trainers’ support Amy’s services, but they insist that human involvement is supplementary. Amy officially launches late this summer, but has generated a positive response so far from beta users.

Whereas x.ai aims to solve a specific problem in scheduling meetings, Viv seeks to create a more broad type of personal assistant capable of completing a variety of tasks. A key feature of this platform lies in the fact that Viv is designed to work with third-party software. Where Siri often falls back on a search engine to answer complicated questions, Viv seems capable of finding an answer by relying on the support of the company’s partners.

Customer Service

Last month, DigitalGenius launched its Human + AI customer service platform. The platform works withs existing customer services software, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Oracle, to implement automated chatbots in place of people in the more repetitive portions of customer service inquires. The technology uses previous transcript data logs to predict a likely response. This integration effectively allows for the human customer services workers to exclusively work on more complex tasks.

As the future of industry-specific human/AI collaboration progresses, it’s creative uses are likely to also expand. The dynamic of speech recognition could soon aid both consumers and producers in troubleshooting anything that has a manual. Gone will be the days of finding YouTube tutorials, since every product, activity, and customer service department could have a speech recognition bot capable of memorizing complex instructions and manuals. Although the overall appeal to man working against or for a machine can lead to interesting conversations worth having, the near-term light may be shining brighter on man working with machine, and perhaps that’s where we should turn the bulk of our focus.