Summary
Intelligent assistance, chatbots, voicebots, and voice-enabled devices, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have stormed into our lives, offering many ways to improve daily tasks, through natural human-computer communication. In fact, some of the applications that we use today already take advantage of voice/chat-enabled interaction to ease our lives. Whether we are turning the lights on and off in our living room with a simple voice command or shopping online with a Facebook Messenger bot, conversational UI makes our interactions more focused and efficient.
Fast-forward from today, we can assume that conversational UI, and more specifically voice-enabled communication, will replace all interactions with computers. In the movie Her (2013), written and directed by Spike Jonze, an unseen computer bot communicates with the main character using voice. This voicebot (played by Scarlett Johansson) assists, guides, and consults the main character on any possible matter. It is a personal assistant on steroids.
Its knowledge is unlimited, it continues to learn all the time, it can create a conversation (a true exchange of ideas), and at the end it can even understand feelings (however, it still doesn't feel itself). However, as we've seen above, with current technology, real-life conversational UI still lacks many of the components seen in Her and faces unsolved challenges and question marks around it. The experience is limited for the user, as it's still mostly un-contextual and bots are far from understanding feelings or social situations.
Nevertheless, with all the limitations we experience today, creating a supercomputer that knows everything is more within reach than creating a super-knowledgeable person. Technology, whether in the form of advanced AI, ML, or DL methodologies, will solve most of those challenges and make the progress needed to build successful bot assistants.
What might take a bit more time to transform is human skepticism: conversational UI is also limited because its users are still very skeptical of it. Aware of its limitations, we stick to what works best and tend to not challenge it too much. When comparing children-bot interaction with that of adults, it is clear to see that while the latter group stays within specific boundaries of usage, the former interacts with the bots as they are real adult humans – knowledgeable about almost everything. It might be a classic chicken or the egg dilemma, but one thing is for sure: the journey has started and there's no going back.
