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In five years, you will not be buying phones for the power of its camera or how sleek it looks or a foldableĀ display.
In fact, you will not be buying a āphoneā. You will be hiring a digital assistant.
An assistant who will be available to you through an ear piece, a flat piece of glass (āphoneā) in your pocket and in yourĀ car.
What should a good assistant do?
Say, you hired a real, flesh and blood human assistant. Letās say her name is Amy. How would you interact withĀ Amy?
Amy, I want to see my dentist this month. Get meĀ in.
or
Amy, for New York, can you get us into an Airbnb instead of aĀ hotel?
or evenĀ this
Amy, can you find us a good place for dinner for Jillās birthday?
Each of these seemingly simple tasks is very complex to do for a digital assistant. It requires multiple layers of context and third party interactions.
Getting the jobĀ done
Your assistant, human or digital, will need to do three complex things that each have varying degrees of difficulty.
- Understanding language: Your assistant will need to understand what you areĀ saying.
- Finding context: Your assistant will need to āknowā who your dentist is and that āfor New Yorkā refers to your upcoming trip to New York. Your assistant will need to reach into your email, your calendar and your records to find and remember things aboutĀ you.
- Working the job: Your assistant will need to reach out to your dentist or your Airbnb host or a restaurant, to book your root canal, get you a house to stay in or that perfect table for two by theĀ window.
āWorking the jobā is the LastĀ Mile.
The last mileĀ problem
Exponential improvements in natural language understanding will take care of (1). Your assistant will be able to figure out what you are saying (more orĀ less).
Calendars, emails and other personal information can already be found in digital repositories. These repositories provide varying levels of access to digital assistants. This handles the data access part ofĀ (2).
Now, make no mistake, ācontextā is hard and determining and maintaining multiple layers of context is very complicated but it will be solved algorithmically.
This brings us to the last mile: working theĀ job
How will Amy ātalkā to my dentist, negotiate an appointment and book meĀ in?
How will Amy work out that perfect table by the window at my favorite restaurant?
Most small and medium businesses are analog / human at the points where they interact with customers.
Can we expect AI assistants to converse with humans for the last mileĀ ?
While understanding human speech to determine intent is difficult to say the least, generating human-like speech to carry out a back and forth with humans is orders of magnitude moreĀ complex.
The complexity of the last mile comes not from algorithmic complexity, but from getting a variety of actors to interface with digital entities like AI assistants.
Handling the lastĀ mile
Businesses like medical offices and restaurants will need a pure digital, unstructured interface to carry out tasks from digital assistants.
Today, a business has a phone number (human interface), email (human interface), fax (human interface). All these interfaces to customers are manned by humans and therefore constrained by human work conditions.
Yes, business have websites but websites are poor interfaces for digital assistants. Most businesses do not have websites through which you can handleĀ tasks.
The best digital interface will be one that can accept queries and commands in plain text and provide responses or perform actions. Such a pure unstructured digital interface will be a chatĀ bot.
A dentist can deploy a chat bot that interfaces with her scheduling system, her patientĀ records.
The retailer can have a chat bot that connects to their supply chain system and respond to queries about shippingĀ times.
The restaurant can have a bot that responds to queries for reservations and information on specials andĀ menus.
With such digital agents representing businesses, a digital personal assistant will only have to discover the interface. It can then issue text commands to carry outĀ tasks.
A text conversation between digital agents could dispense with the ānicetyā overhead of human conversation and get jobs doneĀ fast.
The Assistants areĀ coming.
But Assistants are going to need business chat bots to take them the lastĀ mile.
AI Assistants and the last mile problem was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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