On Thursday the White House will host a summit to discuss developments in artificial intelligence (AI) with Accenture, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and representatives
from many other companies.
The tech companies will be joined by more than 100 senior government officials, academics, and research and business leaders, according to one report.
President Donald Trump’s tech advisor Michael Kratsios will host the meeting. The administration estimates the U.S. government spent more than “$2 billion in unclassified programs alone
during the 2017 fiscal year to research and develop AI technology, reportsThe
Washington Post, citing data from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Google and Microsoft are charting their respective paths in AI, and on separate
occasions have been very public in their quest to develop AI platforms and embed the technology into all their respective services. For example, Microsoft touts AI as being the backbone of Bing, its
search engine.
Microsoft on Monday also announced the idea of running AI projects on top of semiconductor chips called field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs that can be programmed to
quickly support software. A service connected to a new cloud offering for image-recognition projects powered by the FPGA technology will support the healthcare division of Nestle, which will analyze
the severity of acne from pictures submitted by patients.
Google announced on Tuesday the development of Duplex, an experimental feature based on artificial intelligence (AI) in Assistant that
can make calls to businesses on a consumer’s behalf and carry out a conversation to book restaurant reservations and hair appointments. No doubt this is the first of many similar features to
come that will build on applications for self-driving cars and facial recognition.
The technology built into Google Assistant can carry on natural conversations, taking a step past the very
sophisticated AI technology from SoundHound’s platform, Houndify.
Duplex also learns the nuances of speech in the process, and pulls from information stored in connected devices such as
a smartphone calendars to make decisions on the human’s behalf.
During the Trump administration’s summit scheduled for later this week, U.S. government officials intend to
discuss funding for “cutting-edge research” into technologies like machine learning for agriculture, health care and transportation.
The advancements in AI technology brings up
another important question -- whether companies developing natural voice technologies like Duplex should tell callers they are talking to a machine as the machine encounters more complex tasks other
than a simply reservation.
The AI, with all the nuances of human speech patterns such as Ums and Uhs, seems human-like. In an interview, Yossi Matias, Google vice president of
engineering, told CNET the software would likely tell the
person on the other end of the phone they are talking to an AI machine. CNET reports that if the robot cannot complete the task, the call will get kicked to a call center to complete the task. At
least for now.