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AI assistant

It's now fairly clear what tech pundits like Andrew Rubin mean when they say Bogus Intelligence volition be the operating system of the future – that is, some kind of omnipresent, all listening entity that will live within our cars, houses and cell phones, taking orders and answering questions (all the while vacuuming upward every concluding shred of privacy we thought nosotros had left).  Already, nascent forms of this can be seen in the likes of Amazon's Alexa, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana. As if the infinite wasn't crowded enough, now the Chinese search behemothic Baidu is throwing its lid in the ring with a newly minted AI assistant/platform chosen DuerOS. Allow's pop the hood and see what'due south behind DuerOS and where it is likely to accept the field.

self driving car

Baidu's self driving car, just one of the many devices slated to run DuerOS. Prototype Courtesy CNN Money

The first matter to understand near the next wave of AI assistants, which includes DuerOS, is they will be device agnostic. That is, they will live in the cloud and follow united states of america from device to device, seamlessly syncing across time and space. If this doesn't give yous evil nightmares of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey , information technology probably should, because reading lips will likely be just ane of the many "superpowers" these AI assistants possess. For anyone with an android smartphone, Google probably already knows more about your recent history than you exercise! Incertitude this, just check out your Google Timeline or Search History for a creepy, dystopian, stroll downwardly memory lane. But the AI assistant to rule them all will exist the one best positioned to brand sense of these breadcrumbs left behind when nosotros search the net or enable location tracking on our cell phones, and thereby anticipate our actions and desires.

For this reason DuerOS has an immediate reward over some of the competitors. Baidu has 1 billion gadget hungry Chinese already using its search engine, providing it with an enormous amount of data for its AI to sift through and "railroad train upon". They also accept direct access to many of the device manufacturers which are located in Red china, making adoption by hardware firms potentially more swift. Already Baidu is in conversation with some top speaker manufactures to pursue incorporating DuerOS into audio devices, ala Alexa.  However, going forrard there will be a number of challenges to be surmounted, some detail to DuerOS and others faced by the entire field.

To my listen, the biggest trouble of all is that the entire AI assistant category smells like a solution in search of a trouble.  Many of these assistants experience like tech wizardry dreamed up by  Silicon Valley nerds that offer little in the way of mean solar day to day utility. Telling Amazon Alexa to turn on your living room lights isn't that different from The Clapper low-cal of the 1980's, for the simple reason that unless the voice recognition works flawlessly, and allow me tell you it currently doesn't, than it is easier simply to go upwardly and turn on the light yourself than wait for Alexa to figure out what you've been shouting at her. In the finish what is envisioned as an comeback becomes another fashion to drain and frustrate us. Sadly so many in Silicon Valley fail to realize that there is a limit to how many ways yous tin can slice a person'southward attention among different gadgets and operating systems earlier they dissolve into a gibbering puddle of nervous indecision.

DuerOS will non simply take to notice a solid use instance beyond turning on lights and adjusting speaker volumes, it will need to somehow penetrate the English speaking market which is already saturated with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. And so while Baidu clearly has grand visions for its newly minted Os, it volition have to show information technology tin can run with the large dogs before it deserves more than than a passing glance.