This week, I was reading a few blog posts from two of the great minds at a16z about conversational interfaces and the hype behind it and ai is just a fluke and calm down young Padawans all of this will be forgotten in two years ...
I thought i would add my three cents to the conversation.
See, from my vantage point it's not about Alexa being the latest "it" fad put by amazon's geniuses to foster more ordering. It's about another entry point and an additional way to interact with machines.
When I grew up the only method of interaction was the keyboard. Then came the mouse and the GUI. Then came the joystick. then (giant leap forward) the multi touch screen. Then another 10 years and we have consistently correct and realtime NLP, even when buried in harmonic noise.
I went from LISP to Python, from 3 days to train a simple 3-layer perceptron to 2 mins.
And everything in between: I've seen walled garden ecosystem plays evolve into API and platform businesses. From supply-side to demand-side economies of scale.
All I see today is new and exciting ways to interact with machines. Alexa and Echo are just the beginning. I've absolutely mesmerized with Facebook's Oculus and the new Apple ARkit.
So now that storage and computing power are virtually free, that broadband is ubiquitous, and IPv6 router adoption around the corner, the proliferation of ways to interact with machines can only move us forward.
So my thoughts are It's not that in isolation conversational interfaces are narrow, in aggregate, added to all the other ways of interaction with machines, they add quite a lot: See, you can do something else with both your eyes and hands and still interact with echo and alexa.
That's very powerful.
The obvious target could be the car but we're probably seeing the last generation of drivers being born today.
I am more thinking about Star Trek and the Enterprise. They're interacting with machines in so many different ways.
it's really the sum of the little things that is the big disruption here. For example whether you're a mechanic or a dentist you've got a very simple problem while you work - your hands and eyes are busy. Not your ears and mouth. Bingo! (For now, we will augment that with AR and glasses in the near future, but not now).
From "Alexa how's my medical inventory doing?" to "Alexa has my next patient arrived?" I see today simple and uselful ways to help small business owners get more efficient during their work day.
Here's a link to a few videos that highlight what I am working on right now.
Have a good week.
Later!
-Phil
