‘Siri, are we ready for virtual assistants?’

“Interesting question,” Siri replies, coyly.

It is indeed an interesting question, and one that is likely to shape the next few years in smartphone technology, and increasingly the direction of the ‘connected home’ industry.

The focus for the Silicon Valley tech giants has increasingly been on having the best Artificial Intelligence interface which can serve you information exactly when you ask for it, and can even book taxis, order food and message contacts. “We’re moving from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world,” said CEO Sundar Pichai at the #MadeByGoogle event at the beginning of October.

In short, we are expected to be running our lives through conversations with our devices. But does this expectation translate through to reality?

The AI wars

Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz emphasises that AI technology comes in two parts — voice recognition, and the subsequent ability to act on the query. “The voice part is pretty much there now,” he explained to us, “but to act on any query, you would need to have either a human or something with human-level intelligence behind it, which of course we don’t have at all, yet.”

This manifests itself most strongly in Chatbots, which have been making headlines since Facebook announced support for them in Messenger. Since then, there have been numerous accounts of Chatbots gone wrong; unless the question is asked in precisely the right way, a useful answer is fairly unlikely. Voice recognition is not the issue here, but instead an inability to process the query any more effectively than a Google search.

Despite this, there have been huge strides forward in AI processing this year. Google’s AI capability is being put to full use in its virtual assistant, which is coming to phones as a standalone app, and is the foundation for the new ‘connected home’ vision, starting with Google’s voice-activated speaker: Google Home.

The advantage Google’s Assistant has over rivals is that it holds conversations rather than dealing with individual requests. It also draws on Google’s Knowledge Graph; a database which collects millions of pieces of information about what people search for, but more importantly, the intent behind the keywords.

But Amazon’s Echo, featuring its own cloud-based virtual assistant Alexa, has also made headlines in the last couple of months as it has finally been released after a 2 year wait to the UK to positive reviews.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2016 includes virtual personal assistants in its ‘Innovation Trigger’ category, and estimates that the near-endless amounts of data and radical computational power will be one of the most disruptive areas, and will be able to “solve problems that no one has encountered previously”.

The technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. Whether the assistant feeds from a cloud-based learning system or draws on millions of previous search journeys, they appear to have reached a turning point in how they process and attempt to understand our requests.

Supply and demand

The problem is, we don’t seem to want them just yet. Deloitte’s ‘There’s no place like phone: Consumer usage patterns in the era of peak smartphone’ report asked users what they used their virtual assistants for, and the responses were surprisingly lacklustre.

Only a quarter of people use the voice assistant, and 11 percent of that is searching for general information. This poll doesn’t explore frequency of use, which would put regular users in an even greater minority.

We asked The Media Briefing followers on Twitter about how frequently they used the artificial assistant on their own devices:

Demand for virtual assistants is a great deal lower than the hype suggests. So are Google, Amazon and Apple barking up the wrong tree when it comes to demand? Or are they piling their resources into future development in anticipation of our usage increasing?

James Nugent defended Google’s heavy emphasis on AI in an interview with the BBC after the Pixel event earlier this month.

“What makes you think that people WANT to talk to their phones in this way?” the reporter asked.

“I think that people are keen to have interactions in this way because it’s very natural — you and I are speaking and conversing,” James explained. “It’s much easier to do that rather than having to concoct search results out of keywords”.

The issue for now seems to be reliability. Is it quicker to search for the information on Google by tapping a few buttons, or do we trust the voice assistant to understand and process our keywords to surface the results we want faster than we can type?

Amazon’s Echo will be an interesting experiment in consumer appetite for this kind of technology. An estimated 4 million Echoes have been sold so far, with an additional 10 million expected to sell next year. Max Willens puts these numbers into perspective writing for Digiday: “That’s fine year-over-year growth, but it still means that by the end of 2017, there will likely be more people practicing archery (19 million) than people using voice-enabled devices”.

Expense may well be the reason many of us won’t be having a candle-shaped Echo or Google Home for Christmas — after all, £150 is a lot to pay for something which is currently little more than a gimmick.

There are also significant privacy concerns. We would be naïve to assume that Amazon and Google have our best interests at heart when it comes to virtual assistants. Natasha Lomas writing for the Verge neatly highlighted the issue: “The actual price for building a “personal Google for everyone, everywhere” would in fact be zero privacy for everyone, everywhere”.

By inviting virtual assistants into our homes, we invite them into the most intimate parts of our lives. What we often don’t take into account is that they’re already there: occupying the devices that we cannot seem to sleep, eat or talk without.

Absence of Siri

But why, so far, has there been little mention of Siri? Arguably the most well-known personification of artificial intelligence, she popularised virtual assistants to the masses when Apple introduced it as a core function of the iPhone 4S back in 2011.

Since then, Siri’s sassy responses have proved an endless source of amusement for users, but her lack of evolution over time has resulted in Apple falling seriously behind in the AI race.

Writing for the Verge, Walt Mossberg explains that the problem with Siri is that its huge promises has shrunk to little more than basic commands.

“If you try and treat Siri like a truly intelligent assistant, aware of the wider world, it often fails,” he says, before demonstrating a few examples. Apple’s manual fixes to the questions Siri can’t answer doesn’t fix the wider problem — that unlike Google and Amazon, it has no learning system in place.

Walt suggests that this inability to answer basic questions consistently is why people don’t use it for more than sending messages or scheduling reminders. “I suspect that people don’t ask those questions because, after trying a time or two and getting no answers or wrong answers, they just give up on Siri” he concludes.

Behind closed doors

The main reason Siri is doomed in the AI wars is down to Apple’s stance on privacy. The Silicon Valley giant has always been very vocal about the ethics of collecting and analysing user data, and it seems that we are rapidly approaching the stage where those decisions will bite them hard.

“Apple really does seem to see ‘AI’ as ‘just computation’” says Benedict Evans, writing on AI, Apple and Google for his popular blog.

Amazon’s Alexa learns from every interaction, feeding information back into the cloud each time to help it interpret requests. This means that to be effective, it has to be given information about the individual to process, and this is a touchy area in an age where we are more aware than ever about our privacy.

A learning process

Siri may be far from perfect, but the way Google and Amazon are approaching virtual assistants means that they will only continue to get smarter. Voice assistants have to be able to “communicate what you can ask, give that you can’t ask anything,” explained Evans.

We’re a way off the artificial intelligence Doomsday touted by Hollywood, where our virtual assistants overthrow humanity. But we certainly need to think hard about what we have to give over for these processes to improve to the point that artificial intelligence is useful to us.

As for Siri’s opinion on the matter when I pushed her to answer the question, she gave a telling response:

“Unfortunately, Esther, I am as yet imperfect”.