Comment by yorak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yorak | Hacker News Reader

I've been pondering about this for some time and even more after the introduction of Siri, Google Now, and others. I've come to the conclusion that in the near future (artificially) intelligent personal digital assistants will become THE way majority of people will interact with the digital world. It will of course depend on how good and how quickly the assistants evolve, but the potential in productivity gains and transforming the way we live is too big opportunity to be missed. Imagine having a (real) person that would take care of simplifying and helping you with your digital and real life (calendar, meetings, notes, email, flights and other travel, anniversaries, even small research tasks like buy this or that etc.). It would help you immensely by saving time on the fluff of our daily lives and by allowing you to focus on what you deem important.

Therefore I think one of the most important open source projects of the next decade will be to build such a learning intelligent personal digital assistant. A Linux of our generation if you will.. Otherwise this opportunity will be lost to advertisers and others that have interest in steering movements and behavior of the masses. Does anyone know if such an FOSS initiative already exists?

Another possibility is the new, more efficient, ways to interact with your computer.

Direct brain interface maybe.

Pretending that your computer is a human is actually NOT an efficient way of communicating with it. Moreover, it is unreliable and dangerous because those "intelligent" assistants lack intelligence and may do something a human would never do. So one cannot (should not) use them for any mission-critical tasks.

As yet, it would be nice to see at least a non-painful way of editing text on a tablet. Or something better than pen and paper (or an electronic pen and a tablet) to quickly express your thoughts in a graphical form.

What makes you think that it would take less sophisticated AI to parse the signals from your brain directly than it takes for it to parse natural language?

Actually, the direct brain interface and AI are kind of orthogonal. There may be a direct brain interface that would allow to replace mouse and touch interaction, for example, so the interaction method would be purely mechanical in this case. Passing non-spoken words or thoughts to the computer instead of speaking is a different thing.

Because the brain contains extremely useful representations that are difficult to learn from scratch. Data from brain imaging has been used to improve natural language processing algorithms.

Direct brain interface requires invasive surgery and is still a ways to go. Its constant need for recalibration basically precludes it from any useful utilization, much less commercialization of it on a massive scale.

Even if the AI part is mature, I do not think speaking at length (in a public setting) telling your computer what to do is desirable.

I think our best bet is a device that reads neural signals going to our voice box. We can "speak" without vocalization and still have the device pick up our words. I think they call it EEG sensing of imagined speech.

Well, that may improve in the future. The main property of inventions is that they are often completely unexpected.

Maybe there is a wireless way.

Maybe it will be compulsory to have a DBI (direct brain interface) connector in your skull in the future (I hope it won't).

Videos have been successfully reconstructed from fMRI of people's brains. This will certainly improve as fMRIs improve and more advanced machine learning is used to decode the data.

There is also fNIR which can potentially do the same job if I understand correctly.

Great. Does anyone actually use Siri? I still don't see people talking to their phone while walking around.

I like the thought of having a smart assistant, but to me, the input mechanic just doesn't work.

Maybe a brain interface would really kick usage off, but I don't think we should expect that within the next 5 years.

I use it where the overhead of dealing with possible speed recognition errors is less than the overhead of doing the same thing manually.

- Setting a reminder

- Setting a timer

- Asking what the weather is today

Particularly when combined with the plugged in voice activated mode these sort of operations are pretty convenient.

I use Siri daily to send hands free text messages. If you use and state a lot of punctuation when dictating Siri gets it right 94 percent of the time.

I've been using Siri for such since it first became available and I notice with iOS 8 a huge step up in accuracy for dictating text messages.

I also ask Siri hands free to play iTunes radio X genre frequently as well and more.

Re: open source initiative: great idea

There are huge problems though. When I worked at Google in 2013 I used the Knowledge Graph, and the amount of resources in very talented people and computational resources was enormous. Structured knowledge is a foundation for Google Now, Siri, Wolfram Alpha, Viv, and others. Maintaining Ontology's and ingesting data is an expensive endevor.

That said, there are great resources like DBPedia that could be built on. It is possible that a high profile (Apache?) project with a lot of corporate support might produce a system that anyone could use. I would like to participate in such a project :-)

Totally agree. With Siri, Google Now and Cortana soon controlling most devices, we are in desperate need of a FOSS AI assistant, one that "thinks" outside of the "corporate AI scheme". BTW that would also benefit those using GNU/Linux, *BSD, and Unices - where the corporate AI's will probably never land anyway.

I'm a bit more pessimistic. I've tried Siri and Google Now but they just seem to be more involved, less accurate ways to do things I could have done by touch. A good (human) personal assistant should know what I want and execute without involvement on my part, and that requires social cues that are difficult to encode as inputs to machine learning. Until we reach that point all we have is are speech-to-text engines with some services attached, which is not that useful imo.

This used to be absolutely true but is now only mostly true. Setting reminders by saying "Google, remind me to do X at 3pm tomorrow" like you would to a normal person works now much better than aiming at a calendar.

Same with quick searches. It's easier to do a voice search than type the terms on a phone, even with suggestions from your keyboard and Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com