>"Can you make me dinner reservations?"
or
>"Can you help me plan my next vacation?"
I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider distance, parking, attire, etc. While their AI/human trainers might be able to handle this level of complexity eventually, the actual phrasing of the question would likely be much more complex than "can you make me a dinner reservation." Doubly so for something like a vacation which has a lot more moving parts.
But I respect that I'm reflecting on a sample size of one...me. So I'd love to hear from others with more insight into the data around this. Are people actually searching with such generalized queries when it comes to tasks like this? Do most people not sweat the details of things like which restaurant to eat at, or where to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars on a vacation?
Not trolling, serious question.
I'm thinking "get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place".
As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual.
Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query in one go - which is equivalent to tapping 10-15 filters and scrolling through results - ideally combining data from sources that aren't limited to one service.
You can now execute related actions to your result set through the same interface, without needing to shift to a single purpose app that would allow you to take the action, but for most purposes, won't keep your context.
Anecdotally, if we'd ask a real person "where is a good place to eat" the chance we'd go there without more information is slim. And if we don't even trust people, trusting Siri will be a while.
What we're really doing with these questions is making our hunger known, and starting a conversation. We actually don't care that much about other people's thoughts, and we may not even have anything in mind yet as far as where to eat. We do care about how people feel if they are someone we care about, but the thinking part we love to do ourselves.
So to offer a service that "thinks" is rather misguided, and may even constitute a disservice. We already rejected the talking paperclip in 1996 [0]. It's failure wasn't it's intelligence, but in the value proposition itself. To have a paperclip presume to know better and to tell you what to do was not tempting. It's failure was it's existence.
Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?
> What is Cortana? Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.[1]
--
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-wha...
It really is all about the interface and the efficiency. I have to wonder though at what point is adding all those filters more involved than checking a couple boxes and glancing at a map or some photos. I'm sure a lot of that depends on context (I can't do those things if I'm driving, but I can use voice recognition).
The other thing I'm unclear about is how such a recommendation engine can best present information about tradeoffs. In theory, each of my filters has a weighting, and that weight might be dynamic based on several other factors. Maybe I really want chinese, but the best match is further away or I know there will be lots of traffic, so I might be willing to compromise on thai, but only if they have that one dish I like. And a lot of it is seeing the options in the moment and making a snap decision. Really curious about the approaches to solve that type of problem.
Nope. I don't think anyone would ever leave it up to M (or whatever) to select the restaurant.
What is "best" and to whom? Ideally the software would figure this out but I'd always be wondering if it was just going to TripAdvisor and grabbing the first result.
Another problem is that we don't always know what kind of food we want. There's an urban legend that someone actually called a restaurant "I don't care" so that boyfriends would have a place to go when asking their girlfriend for dinner.
I think the idea with a conversational interface is that it's succinct and on-demand. You receive the most relevant information directly in as simple of an interface as possible (arguably).
It's much faster for me to hit a few filters on things like prices and locations. Distance is just a simple ".2 miles away" text on the box, which shows an image and snippets of reviews. People are more and more visual.
I don't think a conversational interface _replaces_ a visual one.
It's that the initial query can be complicated, and it allows you to get into that 5-6 tier deep part of your search that you would have gotten to by using 5 filters and scrolling through 50 results.
Set timer for 5 minutes
Add eggs to shopping list
Play Clocks by Coldplay
Weather
To make this useful, perhaps you could set up some kind of saved preferences. For example, let's say I'm setting up a business trip. I like hotels that are within 1 mile of the conference center, and they have to be at least 3.5 stars and up. Provided they meet those criteria, the cheapest option is acceptable. I also need a plane flight that has no more than 1 layover, and that layover cannot last longer than 90 minutes or less than 45. I am willing to pay up to 25% more for a nonstop flight. The flight must arrive the day before the conference, but it can depart on the day the conference ends.
Setting up those criteria for each individual search would be irritating and a waste of effort, as they don't change from trip to trip. However, if I could say something like "Let me tell you about my criteria for choosing a location for a business trip.", and then go into detail once, that might work. Hell, I'd be perfectly happy setting up the details on a website. Then, the next time I said "I need to set up a business trip", all it would need to ask is the conference center and the dates of the conference.
Until it supports these kinds of detailed requests, it doesn't make sense to use these kinds of services in the way they market them - you'll end up using it in the same limited way you could use Siri. For example, if you've already decided what restaurant you want, you might say "Make me a reservation at Dorsia for 7:30 this evening" instead of the examples you provided.
Just my 2 cents.
I used to fly in to the Bay Area very often on business. At first the office manager arranging things would ask me details about which airline and which flights I'd prefer after listing the options, and which hotels, describing address and location and how near they were the office. Possibly e-mailing me a bunch of links for me to look at. But after just a few trips it was down to "is flying out on the 2.30 on Wednesday and returning on the 3.15 the following Thursday, ok? [she know when I preferred to fly, and she'd implicitly have ensured they were the right code to maximize my chance of an upgrade] Your usual hotel is full, is the Sheraton ok?" [no addresses necessary - we'd boiled it down to 2-3 preferred hotels within walking distance of the office].
I actually don't want a machine to make decisions for me. I want a machine to do what I tell it to do, or present me with I formation required to make a decision.
Examples: if I need a dentist appointment or to schedule maintenance for my air conditioning, I'd like to tell a machine to set it up. Heck, I'll even tell it who to call and which days and times work for me.
If I'm looking for a restaurant, show me the options, give me their distance, top reviews, and some of their dishes. If I want reservations, I'll tell it when and for how many.
Ideally, I want a "Jarvis" from "Iron Man". I ask questions, it gives data in a digestible quantity, and then I can make a decision and tell it what to do. Obviously, such a system is not available (yet), and these inferior systems are needed in order to make progress, and get there...eventually..but sometimes I wonder if the focus is on the right outcome, or just the broad strokes cookie cutter solution that comes to mind first (restaurant reservations). Similar to how all JavaScript MVC frameworks demo a to-do app, and rails tutorials demo'd a blog (initially)...
I mean, seriously... How often do you not go out to eat because you are too lazy or busy to make a reservation? Now, how many times do you skip oil changes, or making calls to cancel your cable service, because you don't want to make time in your day to stop what you're doing, pick up the phone, and call?
If it told me it recommended the restaurants along with commentary like "you really liked X at another place, and this place has been voted to have comparable X, plus it is close by and you've had a long day and need to get up early tomorrow" that would be super useful and help me reach my own conclusion faster.
And if I know which pizza shop I want to order from, what's the benefit of adding an intermediary?
That's why I use an intermediary. If that intermediary was being able to just say "I'd like my usual pizza/Chinese/burrito, but instead of X I'd like Y" and just have it confirm what it was about to do, I'd love that.
If want something new, or I'm somewhere I haven't been before, that's different - then I'll be spending time looking at the menu etc.
But until it elevates from 'digital assistant' level to just 'assistant' (ie. do all the work and just confirm with me before booking) it may not take off as they expect it to
That's the difference between talking to a real person (or good NLP) and a search query.
For me, a lot of what you're doing here is the work that should be done by a machine. Considering "distance, parking, attire, etc." is basically what we have simplex method for.
But I agree the questions seem very vague in the context. To run such errands successfully, the program would have to know much more about your preferences than current iterations of personal assistant software do. And/or hold a dialog with you, asking for details and proposing options.
I guess it just seems incredibly inefficient compared to checking a couple boxes and reviewing a list along with a map or other visual aid.
Over time they learn your preferences so they don't need to ask location for example next time.
Your right though people aren't likely asking such generic things in the first place, but rather something like "can you book me a great mexican place for dinner tonight, 2 people, has parking and casual attire somewhere with great yelp reviews"
Then they send you the best options they found (and the benefits of each one and price range) then you reply back option 1 and they book it.
Bassed on my understanding of semantics and Knowledge engineering, this is doable.
I can't help but picture a large, fluorescent-lit room of jolly old British "trainers" in safari khakis running around admonishing misbehaving AI for telling bad jokes, all the while trying to juggle placing calls to the DMV and restaurants to make reservations for 700 million messenger users.
Same thing as Yelp, just a lot scarier.
I count 4: Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram.
(1) Not for facebook and (2) I don't think that they would inevitably promote every new app to the top — I think they'd rather see how it grows organically first to determine how good it turned out to be.
The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neural net what a cat looks like, it discovered the concept of "catness" by itself (there was a "cat" neuron in the top layer).
I'm wondering who writes all the AI articles I read every day. Such a detail was crucial for the cat story. It's easy to make a cat/non-cat classifier with a few thousand labeled images for each category. The hard thing to do is to take raw photos with no labels and still discover cats.
In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is, classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms. The "cat neuron" was a fun gimmick, but you're reading way too much into it.
Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209
From the abstract: Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not.
The Cat detection thing was just a side product of learning to identify features of things in an unsupervised manner, but the news outlets locked on to that with titles such as "How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000" in NY Times.
Wasn't it amazing that they could distill the concept of cat from images with no help from external labels (human intervention)? They missed the core of the discovery by not understanding that.
The deep learning method is an unsupervised way to process raw input and transform it into useable features. This used to be done by a combination of domain knowledge and supervised training, but they could build an automated way to extract relevant features from images.
This opened the window for hope that one day neural networks will be easily applied to any new domain if there is sufficient raw data to build a deep network for it. In the past there was a need for a large investment in human based data labeling and how to extract the best features from raw data (also described as voodoo magic by the same researchers - it was hard, it was domain locked and expensive).
To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the equivalent of AOL in the 90s.
What then, is the equivalent of a search engine like Google/Yahoo, in that world?
What if you could get a recommendation from your friend's friend without asking them, and without violating trust or privacy? This is what I am building today.
Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.
Congrats to ar7hur! Here's the original Show HN introducing Wit.ai: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373645
M: "How may I help you?"
User: "What are my options for deploying a Python/Django project and making sure it is setup for scalability from the start? Compare five hosting providers for me. No, I don't know what metrics I should look for. Please research these and let me know what they are when you deliver the report. I also need an objective evaluation of our project in order to determine the risks that might be involved in going with Python 3.x rather than 2.x in the context of the libraries we might need to use in the future. Analyze the nature of our application in order to determine what the applicable libraries might be. Also, go through PEP's and make me aware of anything that might be relevant to the above. You have one week."
M: "My responses are limited. Would you like me to find you a restaurant?"
User: "No. I've lived in this town all my life. I know where most restaurants are and I know the handful I frequent. I need help with real questions. I can get the latest weather report, I can find a restaurant, I can order pizzas, I can go to the drive-through if needed and I sure as hell am not going to plan a vacation for my family this way. What I could really use is having you run through seriously time-consuming research, summarize results and present them to me in an easy to consume form. What I could really use is having you save me from doing 40 hours of research across 100 websites. Food, the weather and vacations are not a problem."
M: "Ah, but there's a great new BBQ joint not too far from you"
User: "I'm vegetarian"
M: "My responses are limited. How would you like a thrilling and exciting hunting safari in Africa?"
User: ":-("
Article pitches aren't all inherently bad ideas for articles either. A good example from my industry that I'm pretty sure was from a pitch is this one from the WSJ [1]. The basic concept of regaining focus at work is a strong one that resonates with people right now, but all the blog post ends up being is an ad for the product.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-desi...
It's not in FB's interest to make honest recommendations. If Bob's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting exposure for free?
But it's all AI - no human assists :)
But I'm far away from launching it and it's only a side project. But it's cool to see so many in the space doing something I also want / wanted to do.
I know NLP is difficult, and frankly i hate doing it, but i want an expressive language to "speak" to an internal process i use (a bot), and NLP seems like the only solution. I imagine a rule based approach is best (for my simple needs), but i have yet to see any examples that come close to wit.ai.
Appreciate any replies :)
It's pretty good for a basic set and you can train more. Ultimately, you need something that is learning online and that will require an understanding of ML techniques such as CRFs.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_(entrepreneur) [1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_ter...
1. Motivated team in a larger company builds new, cool product (in this case Messenger) 2. It's good and becomes successful 3. The rest of the company wants to get in on that, think of ways to add value 4. A bunch of stuff gets bundled, some good, most bad 5. Some of the original team stay around, most get disillusioned and go work on something else 6. Eventually, the app becomes another iTunes
A few weeks ago I was trying to find toys for my son. I was most interested in "things for a 6 month old". They did have that filter, but it was 0 - 24 months. At this age a few months make a HUGE difference. I wish the box was a bit more fine grained.
So it can spend my money in behalf of me?
Ohh, wait, can it do something else?
Apparently this is 4 images and it shows up like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-...
Can anyone do this? If so, how exactly?
I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel, but it is M.
Well, M is also a fictional character in James Bond - head of MI6.
Afaik, they haven't been shut down. It's actually even free now.
[0] not that it's a bad thing, but wondering it's more than just "facebook bought it". Funny as it is, I trust that companies will go on when facebook buys them as opposed to google or amazon.
We have been building Q ! :)
