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M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

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Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#131

Post by dragonwriter »

unabst wrote: post #130
viksit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Those are too broad. I'm thinking " get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place ". As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual. Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query…

I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the intentions expressed thus far". Anecdotally, if w…

> Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

No, its not a glitch that Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and now M have essentially the same pitch -- they are direct competitors intended to attach people to their respective platforms.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#132

Post by chillacy »

ot wrote: post #104
visarga wrote: post #83

> Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like. The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neur…

Unsupervised training may isolate the defining features of a cat picture, but it won't know that that's what we call "cat", so no unsupervised system will be able to identify cats in videos unless you show it at least one labeled image ("show it what a cat looks like"). In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is, classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms…

That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#133

Post by JetSpiegel »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #117

User: "Hello M." M: "How may I help you?" User: "What are my options for deploying a Python/Django project and making sure it is setup for scalability from the start? Compare five hosting providers for me. No, I don't know what metrics I should look for. Please research these and let me know what they are when you deliver the report. I also need an objective evaluation of our project in order to determine the risks t…

M: Bing Edition

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#134

Post by mkopinsky »

Johnie wrote: post #116
shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

Have you ever used a concierge service either at a hotel or over the phone? It usually takes a form of a back and forth conversation to identify what you really want. That's the difference between talking to a real person (or good NLP) and a search query.

I guess part of this is that I'd prefer the concierge to hand me a list of restaurants than have to have a whole conversation about what the options are. I don't want expertise, I want curated information.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#135

Post by foldr »

chillacy wrote: post #132
ot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsupervised training may isolate the defining features of a cat picture, but it won't know that that's what we call "cat", so no unsupervised system will be able to identify cats in videos unless you show it at least one labeled image ("show it what a cat looks like"). In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is, classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms…

That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

It's not a merely semantic argument. Google's system did not learn that the sound 'cat' is associated with that particular concept. You need some kind of supervised learner to make that association.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#136

Post by stevesearer »

frostmatthew wrote: post #127
pdeuchler wrote: post #60

Is it just me or does this article read as a thinly veiled sales pitch to anyone else?

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Bingo.

Article pitches aren't all inherently bad ideas for articles either. A good example from my industry that I'm pretty sure was from a pitch is this one from the WSJ [1]. The basic concept of regaining focus at work is a strong one that resonates with people right now, but all the blog post ends up being is an ad for the product.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-desi...

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#137

Post by doublerebel »

viksit wrote: post #77

Thought: There's going to be a need for a very open platform that can do things like this, which will offset many of the worries that have been echoed on this thread today about one or a few corporations having access to everything. To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the equivalent of AOL in the 90s. What then, i…

I believe we don't want an equivalent to Google/Yahoo -- we need an improvement over search. Rather than trusting corporations to deliver the knowledge we seek, we should rely on our personal trust graph -- like we did in the old days. Otherwise the constant influx of biased, irrelevant information will be overwhelming.

What if you could get a recommendation from your friend's friend without asking them, and without violating trust or privacy? This is what I am building today.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#138

Post by waterlesscloud »

unabst wrote: post #130
viksit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Those are too broad. I'm thinking " get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place ". As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual. Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query…

I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the intentions expressed thus far". Anecdotally, if w…

If I ask someone I know what's a good place to eat, the odds are actually quite high that I'll give it a try. I wouldn't have asked otherwise.

The issue here is one of trust, which is built on an individualized relationship over time. When I ask someone I know for a recommendation, I'm doing so because I already have a sense of their judgment. That's more the key here- build a history of reliable judgment. That's the goal.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#139

Post by hiddencost »

chillacy wrote: post #132
ot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsupervised training may isolate the defining features of a cat picture, but it won't know that that's what we call "cat", so no unsupervised system will be able to identify cats in videos unless you show it at least one labeled image ("show it what a cat looks like"). In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is, classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms…

That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

The thing is the network didn't learn the features you described. Take a simple example : neural networks confuse leopard print couches with leopards. Why? Because the network learns discriminative features based on the data it has. Theres not shared concept saying "oh this is an animal with for legs".

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#140

Post by dbot »

shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

Agree completely. I saw a similar issue with sites like Operator, Magic, etc. The requests were very vague, making me wonder, "Am I spending too much time thinking about where to order a pizza from?"

And if I know which pizza shop I want to order from, what's the benefit of adding an intermediary?

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