My Friend, the Virtual Assistant

My Friend, the Virtual Assistant 

The other morning my husband was reading the Wall Street Journal when he happened upon an article he thought I would find interesting. Titled Virtual Assistants Have Hit a Wall, we both thought the premise of the article would make a good basis for an OnMouseClick column.

What exactly is a virtual assistant? As defined by the website TechTarget:

A virtual assistant, also called AI assistant or digital assistant, is an application program that understands natural language voice commands and completes tasks for the user.

An early idea of AI Assistant (AI stands for artificial intelligence) was highlighted in a book and companion video back in the dark ages of 1987, when then Apple CEO John Sculley, introduced the idea of a Knowledge Navigator. I remember being fascinated watching a video that featured a university professor returning home and turning on a tablet sized computer back when mobile devices were still in the realm of science fiction. The image of a bow-tie wearing butler (or virtual assistant) appears on the computer screen and tells the professor that he received several phone calls while he was out, and did he want to hear the messages. The professor tells the computer to ignore the phone calls and to compile data for an upcoming lecture. While compiling the research data, the computer mulit-tasks and answers a phone call from another professor. The video concludes with the two professors having a video based conversation about their upcoming lecture.

The idea of a Knowledge Navigator did foretell the future in many ways. We all use a handheld mobile device in a variety of sizes, and through these devices, we receive both voice and video telephone calls. Voice dictation is widely used, especially in the field of medicine, and access to virtual assistants proliferates, even if the AI behind them is not up to the level of the Knowledge Navigator.

Amazon Alex and Google Assistant are stand-alone devices for the home that can be programmed to obey voice commands. You can program these devices to turn lights on and off, lock and unlock doors, and issue weather and traffic reports on command. Apple Siri is a virtually installed on all Apple mobile devices. By pressing a button, or saying “Hey Siri,” you can ask it to give you specific information (“When is the next St. John’s basketball game?”), make a phone call to someone in your Contacts address book (“Call Eddie” will initiate a phone call to my husband’s cell phone), and add notes and reminders to your respective apps.

In his article Mr. Pierce states that while virtual assistant can make our lives easier, they often require a great deal of programming before the required tasks can be preformed, and often are not yet ready to do all that we would like. He suggests that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to have your devices automatically lock the doors in your house if you don’t have complete faith in the AI. After instructing AI to lock the doors, he still feels the need to walk around the house to verify that the doors are actually locked. 

I feel the same way about locking our new Honda Odyssey. When the key fob is on your person you lock the doors by touching the door handle, but the doors are also supposed to lock if you simply walk away from the car. However, I just don’t trust the system enough to be sure that it works – and I cannot test it, because if I go back to try and open the door, it automatically unlocks because the key fob is in my purse.

I have encountered a similar problem with Siri on my iPhone. iOS devices have a built in Reminders app that can be used to make lists of – reminders! You can create and name multiple lists, and I have several, including the ubiquitous Reminders list, and my most used Grocery List. In theory, all I have to do is say out loud “Hey Siri,” and my iPhone will open a screen with the words “What can I help you with?” Then I tell it what I want to  put on my Grocery List. I was originally perplexed as to why sometimes it worked, and sometimes it did not. After much trial and error, I discovered that in order for Siri to understand what to add to a list, I needed to always use the word ADD, not PUT as I was doing some of the time. If I said “Put milk on my grocery list,” Siri did not know what to do, but saying “Add milk to my grocery list” works 99% of the time. Every year more and more technology is introduced that is designed to make our lives easier, but along the way there are as many steps back as forward, and often the learning curve for us, and the AI, is steep.

As I write this column the annual CES is taking place in Las Vegas. According to the official CES website (formerly called the Consumer Electronics Show, but now known only by the acronym CES), it is where “next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace.” In next week’s column I will highlight some of the innovations that are scheduled to enter the marketplace in 2019.