Alexa, what are you doing to the internet?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Voice assistant apps like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant are about to transform the economics of the web.
Nearly a quarter of all households in the US and in China already have a smart speaker in their homes, allowing them to play music, order a delivery or find out the news, all by simply talking to their computer. Meanwhile an estimated 2.5bn smartphones now carry these wannabe AI oracles.
Manuela Saragosa asks Silicon Valley analyst Carolina Milanesi whether this new technology could one day rival the conversational prowess of the ship's computer on Star Trek. And what kind of vision do the likes of Google, Apple and Amazon have for it?
Meanwhile journalist and author James Vlahos explains why he thinks their advent is bad news for anyone who wants to maintain any visibility on the internet. And we put his criticisms to one of the major players - Andrew Shuman from the team behind Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Amazon Echo Sub subwoofer; Credit: Philip Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Sagarosa. Coming up, is the future humans talking with machines? |
| 0:10.3 | It's really magical, right? But no digital assistant today can kind of say, oh, did you mean this or this? I think we'll see some real breakthroughs in the next year to two years. |
| 0:20.2 | Silicon Valley wants us to talk to our computers, removing screens altogether, and critics |
| 0:26.1 | say the implications could be profound. We have the emergence of AI oracles, and when they can |
| 0:33.2 | just bring a fact to us rather than us having to go out and laboriously hunt for it. |
| 0:38.5 | It's convenient, but we get a little weaker at hunting and critical thinking. |
| 0:44.4 | That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.0 | Most kids love digital voice assistants like Siri on the iPhone or Amazon's Alexa, |
| 0:56.3 | and it has nothing to do with snazzy software. |
| 0:59.3 | In my kids' case, the fun is in catching Siri out, or at least trying. |
| 1:04.6 | You're nice. |
| 1:06.5 | Thanks. You're not so bad yourself. |
| 1:10.0 | Well, I don't like you anymore. |
| 1:13.0 | But... |
| 1:13.8 | This conversation is very random. |
| 1:18.8 | I'm not sure I understand. |
| 1:21.1 | You don't understand anything? |
| 1:23.9 | Oh, no. Sorry. |
| 1:26.0 | Are you dumb? |
| 1:31.8 | I'm smart enough to know not to answer that question. |
| 1:38.4 | Clearly, we're a long way off how, the sentient AI in the film 2001, a space odyssey, or even the ship's computer on the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. But Silicon Valley would like digital voice assistance to boldly go where no software has gone before. |
| 1:49.3 | The aim is to create a digital voice that talks to you like a friend or advisor. |
... |
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