The Rise of Voice and Collective AI

WHAT DO WE WANT?
Natural language processing!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
Sorry, when do we want what?

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) January 22, 2017

Ben Evans is a partner at the renown venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z). He generously shares his industry insights with the public and has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter.

In Ben's recent post Voice and the Uncanny Valley of AI, he started with

Voice is a Big Deal in tech this year. 

The Rise of Voice

Ben attributed the rise of voice to four causes: 

1. The advancement in machine learning reduced the error rate in voice recognition and natural language processing.
2. Better hardware, lower cost.
3. If voice most existed as people's side projects in the past, the resource is abundant today. 
4. The desktop-to-mobile platform evolution has shown, the more engaging UX is, the more control companies have which own these platforms - Apple and Google had more control over the mobile user base than Microsoft ever had with the desktop.

The twitter feed from Ben at the top of the post was mocking at AI not being able to connect dots in a human way. In fact, the ability of today's virtual assistants at handling context in a conversion is continuously increasing. You can ask a series of questions such as:

"What are the 5 star rating restaurants nearby?" 

"How far is the first one?" 

"How much  does it cost for Uber to take me there?"

And product such as Hound handles it like a champion. You don't even need to get out of the app to call for a Uber ride of your choice.

The Era of Sharing Economy, Knowledge & Intelligence

Collective AI came into view as one of the key contributors to the increased AI performance. Collective intelligence is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. What happens when we apply this to building AI?

SoundHound is the leading innovator in voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies. SoundHound's vision of Collective AI is to provide the tools and platform for developers to build more intelligent solutions easily and rapidly. 

The era of sharing economy, knowledge and intelligence brings a voice-enabled AI platform and its technology to the ISV community - something once only possessed and controlled by name brands such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. What a gift!


The closing thought - what's the face of your personal AI? 

For the record, my personal AI definitely has the face of Wall-E. ;o)

Read my related machine learning articles:
Want More Funding? Machine Learning!
How to Build a Recommendation Engine without Machine Learning Experts?

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