Last week, the National Transit Highway Safety Administration released a statement saying the artificial intelligence system in Google’s self-driving car legally qualifies as a driver in the US, therefore meeting all safety standards for driving on public roads—without a steering wheel or conventional brake pedal.
This marks the first of many huge steps toward streamlining autonomous cars, robots, and other various products into becoming household standards —like AI assistant, Siri.
So what exactly is AI? How will cognitive tech affect our businesses? What happens when machines are faced with ethical decisions? If questions like these have crossed your mind in the past, Randi sat down with Duy Huynh, CEO of Autonomous AI, the creators of the first Personal Robot shipping this year, and Mikhail Naumov, the President and Chief Strategy Officer of DigitalGenius, a platform which uses AI and natural language processing to enable fully automated, human-like conversations for business to discuss how AI works:
DUY HUYNH
– CEO of AUTONOMOUS AI
“We had a couple of influencers tweet about us and saw a huge increase in sales.”
“We are focused on putting AI to work for you. Most of us spend ½ of our life at work.”
“AI is a way that automates a lot of things for you.”
“20 or 30 years ago we had personal machines. The Personal Robot is the personal computer 2.0.”
“You have apps to choose from: Security, warehouse inventory tracking. Now you have 3 or 4 robots to fix human errors.”
“We have an office desk that shares the same NLP, speech recognition with Maya, our female prototype.”
“Why do we look at things like office desks with AI? Because your office desk is where you spend most of your time.”
“We are producing about 2000 units.”
“We build robots similar to how people build software. We want to get our product out the door as soon as possible.”
“We’ve had about 10,000 backers so far.”
“We want to think about how we can be more helpful to people.”
“When we people think of robots, they think of humanoids. That’s not reality.”
“We focus on functionality and make sure the robots can do the tasks that we build them to do.”
“My kids play with a cell phone, they don’t know what a desk phone is. As humans we’re going to learn new skills sets that we should be focusing on.”
“One of the tasks we’ve set up is inventory counting. It frees the employees to spend more to time on things that matter.”
“Our focus is not building robots that you see in movies. We want to help you do things that matter.”
“Interaction with a robot is important with deep learning.”
“We find AI is going to be more helpful to us than harmful.”
“It’s way too early to worry about the ethics of AI. It’s like worrying about the overpopulation of Mars. We’re not there yet.”
MIKHAIL NAUMOV — PRESIDENT & CSO of DIGITALGENIUS
“Celebrity endorsement isn’t as cool as a competitor using our product. We’re on the B2B side.”
“We’ve all called up and talked to a robotic voice that might or might not have been able to help us. DigitalGenius is making that all go away.”
“Consumers are abandoning the phone to text. The problems that exist is there’s a new influx of demand. Brands are going to be left out.”
“We thought that the application of AI would be practical to businesses.”
“We do not build a chatbot that exists on its own. We create an interface to talk to customers correctly.”
“NLP is an area of focus and study that’s been around for decades.”
“NLP is a rule-based approach to train a computer to learn.”
“The traditional NLP approach has been abandoned by deep learning. It allows us to take historical chat logs from a brand and export those to train.”
“When a new tweet comes in, if it knows the answer correctly, it goes through our system first before sending it to an agent.”
“The first electric BMW wanted a technology as innovative as their car so they deployed our tech.”
“Siri is cool because it helps distribute to the channel itself. But most users won’t use something twice if it doesn’t work for them.”
“A search is not always what you’re looking for when asking a question.” #Siri
“There’s a human agent on the other side though they may not be engaged because our AI can help so thoroughly.”
“Not many of us nowadays know how to ride a horse. That’s exactly how we’re going the way of driving. It will become a hobby.”
“Before computers we had the abacus and people were worried about jobs. But nothing happened.”
“You have people answering the same question thousands of times a day. The human is not using all of their cognitive abilities. A computer can free up humans to have real conversations and unlock time and potential.”
“Robots don’t have to look like robots. Technology is becoming invisible and happening in the background.”
“Customer service won’t exist if tech and brands work together where no one has to make a query.”
“There’s no concrete answer for the ethics of AI. If today AI is being used to make life efficient, you have to look at where it all leads.”
“There will be regulators that will be involved in the ethics of AI.”
“The challenge you have with a fully autonomous AI app is sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
“It’s important to build a platform for humans to use AI in daily life.”
Join ‘Dot Complicated with Randi Zuckerberg’ next Wednesday when Big Data gets human. Only on SiriusXM Business Channel 111, 12pm ET/9am PT.
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