Lost in digitalisation? Virtual assistants are yet to learn a lot before sales in India pick up
“I am looking for a good orspital.”
“What is the iskop of the product?”
It takes a person a minute or two to realise that the person means ‘hospital’, and the second person is looking to determine the ‘scope’ of the product.
Welcome to the world of spoken languages, marred by regional dialects and accents and lost to a machine.
This is also the toughest battle digital assistants such as Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s device-based Echo and Apple’s Siri--one of the first entrants in the market. In addition, now a large number of Indian start-ups are working on adapting virtual assistants to the Indian context.
Cutting through app clutter
A select sect of Indians is ordering Amazon’s Echo and trying out Android-based assistants which use voice commands.
“A lot of people are using it for home automation to operate ACs, switch on and off lights using motion detectors by plugging them to virtual assistants,” says Anil Patrick, CEO at Thinking Hat Corporation, a content and brand management company.
Gartner too predicts that by 2019, digital assistants on smartphones and other devices will serve as the primary interface to connected home services in as many as 25% of households in developed economies.
A chunk of the early adopters of this technology exist in the Indian market as well.
Around 10-15 years back, large technology companies like Honeywell and Philips experimented with AI-powered virtual assistants.
According to Patrick, these technologies are not proprietary anymore and with the advent of IoT, these technologies have started talking to each other, easing consumer adoption.
But can the digital assistants replace human assistants? The time hasn’t come as yet, experts say.
Not as much as humans
“There is a long way to go before a digital assistant can replace day to day operations. Currently, they exist in hybrid models which require human intervention and perform pureplay technology operations and provide backend support,” says Vishal Tripathi, digital evangelist and IT consultant.
Apart from accents, digital assistants are currently fighting many biases that come with understanding from sifting through data. They basically work by taking voice commands and connecting them to the myriad of information on the cloud to get answers and responses to the people they assist. They are being used for non-face-to-face interactions like first-level chat support, booking appointments and scheduling but there is long way to go before they replace human assistants.
“Digital assistants will advance and find application in manual data digging and analysis scenarios. But, they are not dynamic and self-configurable for another situation, at least for the foreseeable future. Virtual Assistance will face challenges of language, context, situational and interconnected systems for them to be generally effective,” says Sakthivel Manivannan, IT consultant from Bangalore.
Replacing office assistants?
“AI-driven virtual assistants are not genetically intelligent systems like humans; their intelligence is confined. They have narrow linguistic ability and are data-trained systems, disciplined on a targeted data set culled from practical interaction. This is simply to say that a system to identify a dog as a dog will be fed with thousands of different images of dogs. If they are fed images of dogs and told to label them as cats they will happily do it. These are some of the hazards of bias in these systems,” Manivannan says.
Yet, on a large scale, organisations are turning leaner in size, disallowing executives to have humans assistants or secretaries. They are yet to crack the code of intelligence, which will soon turn into a necessity rather than a fad that it currently is.
Fast learners?
Patrick, however, believes that since these virtual systems can ‘learn’ by sifting and analysing extensive amounts of data, it is only a matter of time before they can understand accents and context.
After all, we live in a world where smartphones and other devices are digesting all that is spoken around them.
Tech plugs 25%
Of households in developed economies will be served by digital assistants on smartphones and other devices by 2019, Gartner predicts
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