Virtual assistants are the cutting edge of end user interaction, thanks to endless set of capabilities across multiple services. Today, we can ask virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Now to perform simple tasks like, “What’s the weather”, “Remind me to take pills in the morning”, etc. in natural language.
They were supposed to have simplified our lives, but they’ve barely made a dent. They recognize only a narrow range of directives and are easily tripped up by deviations. The next evolution of natural language interaction with virtual assistants is in the form of task automation such as “turn on the air conditioner whenever the temperature rises above 30 degrees Celsius”, or “if there is motion on the security camera after 10pm, call Bob”.
But some recent advances are about to expand your digital assistant’s repertoire. In June 2018, researchers at OpenAI developed a technique that trains an AI on unlabeled text to avoid the expense and time of categorizing and tagging all the data manually. A few months later, a team at Google unveiled a system called BERT that learned how to predict missing words by studying millions of sentences. In a multiple-choice test, it did as well as humans at filling in gaps. These improvements, coupled with better speech synthesis, are letting us move from giving AI assistants simple commands to having conversations with them. They’ll be able to deal with daily minutiae like taking meeting notes, finding information, or shopping online.
Military is also developing AI assistants. The battlefield of the future will be complex, with mountains of data moving rapidly between commanders, operations centers and the joint warfighter. In this multi-faceted environment, Army researchers and their partners are seeking solutions. Drones and sensors are steadily getting better, smaller, cheaper and more numerous. There’s more data by the day. “Humans simply cannot process the amount of information that is potentially available,” Touryan said. “Yet, humans remain unmatched in their ability to adapt to complex and dynamic situations, such as a battlefield environment.”
A decrease in cognitive performance can have great impact and therefore around the world, armies are recognizing the importance of maximizing the effectiveness of Soldiers cognitively. Therefore military is planning to employ AI to aid the soldiers. The idea is for the AI—”intelligent agent” is the term the Army uses—to process raw information, leaving the human soldier to do what they’re best at: make decisions, especially creative ones.
“In theory, intelligent agents will have parallel computational power that is much greater than that of humans,” Dr. Jonathan Touryan, a neuroscientist at the Army’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate in Maryland, said in an Army release. “In developing human-agent integration principles, we hope to accentuate the strengths of both while mitigating individual weaknesses.”
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