AI Assistant Summit
London

Consumers could develop closer personal relationships with their digital assistants, if plans to make Google Assistant more personalised and proactive come to fruition.

“MindMeld lets someone deploy an AI-powered conversational interface from start to finish,” Alexander Rosen, a partner at IDG Ventures told me in an interview. “Not many people outside of Amazon and Google have that.”

Despite the hype, there is a lot of work to be done before we can build conversational software. For now, it’s an ugly marriage of bits of AI which “kind of” work and lots of hand coding. These are some notes about what interesting conversational software would look like, and what techniques we’ll need to build it.

SPIXII wants to make your life easy, simple, transparent and more human. Not things you’d usually associate with insurance. Even a whiff of insurance is enough to send most people running: memories of filling out long, tedious forms or being up-sold by smarmy salespeople because you ‘definitely’ need a policy to cover you against killer bees or surprise volcanos.

In 2017 we will see further use of such technology by businesses like banks, insurance companies and retail firms. But it will take a few more years before it becomes mainstream,” said Ken Yeung

In recent years we have seen an accelerated increase in technology innovation, which has pushed the envelope of what is possible. With Healthcare being one of the largest industries, it goes to reason that this area is ripe for disruption in a way that will change our everyday lives.

There’s nothing definitively wrong with technology that interacts with emotions. The question is whether they can be shaped to serve, enhance and entertain, rather than exploit. And given that survey respondents of all ages are rightfully wary, it’s a question that the people should be involved in answering.