Artificial General Intelligence For Rent, $0.20 Per Minute

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 2:25 am

Okay, don’t get too excited, because the first commercially available artificial general intelligence (AGI) is going to be used for, of all things, call centers and telemarketing. But you can get a little excited, because unlike current software robots (AIs), the SmartAction interactive voice response system actually listens to you and is capable of learning. SmartAction’s parent company, Adaptive AI, summarizes the difference between AI and AGI:

To use a human analogy to highlight the difference, imagine an entirely unschooled person. If we wanted to put them to work on an assembly line, we could instruct them with a very detailed script for a specific set of actions; in other words, rote learning, with no real understanding (like programming a traditional AI or ‘expert system’). Or, we could take on the much more difficult task of teaching them to read and write, to think logically and to learn. This would enable them to learn and re-learn any number of jobs in the factory and elsewhere; and to perform them much more intelligently with understanding. This is the AGI approach. Furthermore, an educated person (or AGI) can also manage other entities with low-level skills, or those that possess highly specialized knowledge, thereby greatly increasing their own productivity.

In summary, an AGI’s ability to learn implies a number of advantages over conventional AI technology: It can be taught, instead of having to be programmed; it learns from experience and can learn by itself; it can deal with ambiguity and unknown situations, know when to ask for help, and recover from errors resiliently and autonomously.

This is a lot of promise, and something that future AGIs may be able to offer… Especially tantalizing is the possibility that you might be able to find this in computers and household electronics. The AGI behind SmartAction, though, isn’t quite so sophisticated. It’ll be able to do a couple things that current systems can’t do to make your automated call center experience a little more, um, pleasant… Read what improvements you can expect, after the jump.

A few of the system’s features are:

> When a spoken word or phrase is unclear or ambiguous, it chooses the hypothesis that is most likely or appropriate given the context of the conversation, just as people do. Example: It correctly understands red or read when the expected answer is either a color or an action.

> It expertly handles synonyms and disambiguates pronouns. Example: it recognizes the myriad ways how people say yes (yes, yeah, yep, sure, absolutely, for sure, jez, definitely, etc.) and no (no, nope, nah, no way Jos├⌐, etc.)

> It dynamically optimizes the speech recognition engine and provides personalized responses by continuously understanding the context of the call and remembering the caller’s preferences, previous calls and other relevant data. In subsequent calls, callers don’t have to answer the same questions again, greatly enhancing their experience. If a call is interrupted, it can call the customer back and pick up the conversation where it left off.

That’s all nice stuff, I guess, but I’m kinda waiting for a demo of some kind before I’ll be convinced that the SmartAction AGI is significantly different (and better) than the phone robots that have been calling me ever since I was old enough to have my parents cosign a credit card. SmartAction is for rent for $0.20 per minute, or for sale for $30,000.

[ SmartAction ] VIA [ New Scientist ]

Comments (5)

Category: Artificial Intelligence

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5 Comments

Comment by smallfried

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 5:14 am

This sounds like an adaptive natural language understanding system. Not even close to AGI at least. And it probably doesn’t outperform current top rated language systems from nuance or ibm for instance. But, as they say, seeing is believing..

Comment by Earthworm

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 9:38 am

great, lets give the learning computers access to our data networks. And while we’re at it, hold my key to the nukes… lol

Comment by Vanden

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 10:02 am

Sounds like the beginning of SkyNet to me. Either that or HAL. Or GlaDos. Or Sonny from IRobot. We need to implement the 3 laws now before it is too late.

Comment by Ironman

Made Monday, 9 of February , 2009 at 3:05 pm

I’m in favor of giving robots all the reasoning and emotion that they can handle.

What’s the worst that can happen, you make a human-like robot? Or you mess up and one part of human nature is amplified in the robot and you get a nutso robot?

who needs to be afraid of one single robot?

Terminator was a great movie, but i’m starting to see the negative repercussions that it has had on our society.

Comment by Bruce

Made Tuesday, 10 of February , 2009 at 3:02 pm

I’m with Ironman. Robot horror stories may be fun but they are simplistic, and this meme whereby every new robot or AI application is presumed to be a threat to the human race is very negative and quite irrational.