I found a wonderful comic while procrastinating socializing on Google Plus. Please click through to the image to see the full comic, made by Doghouse Diaries.

Having an Android-phone myself, I haven’t really used Siri much, but the speech and context recognition capabilities are quite impressive. Don’t make a mistake - there is no “sentient” being in your phone. While the algorithms used can clearly be called AI algorithms, but mostly it’s relatively straight-forward search. Siri (and related chat bots) use a large database to look for context clues (like “date” “meeting” “remind” “reminder” and so on for a calendar entry) and then use grammar rules to deduct the corresponding data (date and message for the calendar example).

There is a long debate about how machines can really understand human language (and what understand actually means in this context). Direct commands (Siri) and questions (Wolfram Alpha and Google) are a bit easier to decipher - however they still have their issues.

Stumble it!   Written by Robin

Popularity: 8%