Are friends electric?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When will artificial intelligence be capable of providing intelligent conversation? Jane Wakefield looks at two AI systems that still fall well short in the so-called Turing Test of passing themselves off as human.
Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa may be capable of ordering your groceries or even cracking a joke, but shockingly she has never heard of Business Daily. Despite this clear evidence of limited intelligence, head scientist Rohit Prasad insists that his baby has smarts.
Meanwhile a more glamorous build-you-own-buddy is Sophia (pictured), the android capable of 60 facial expressions, which apparently was enough to earn her Saudi citizenship. But is she more than just a pretty latex face? Jane speaks to her creator and biggest fan, David Hanson.
(Picture: The humanoid robot Sophia, which was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia; Credit: Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service with me, Jane Wakefield, where today we'll be asking, what kind of relationship should we be developing with AI in the home? |
| 0:11.7 | Hey, Google, play Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:16.7 | Streaming BBC World Service UK from the BBC. |
| 0:24.1 | Hey, I'm not going to do. Streaming BBC World Service UK from the BBC. Hey Alexa, play Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:30.1 | Hmm, I couldn't find Business Daily. Try asking me to recommend a podcast. |
| 0:36.3 | Alexa, can you recommend me a podcast? |
| 0:40.0 | I couldn't find any songs that match your request. |
| 0:44.2 | That's me putting some of the virtual assistance we have in our homes to the test |
| 0:48.0 | with a pretty simple question. |
| 0:50.2 | And as you can hear, I got mixed and rather unhelpful results. |
| 0:54.3 | This somewhat unscientific experiment suggests we are still a long way from an AI |
| 0:58.8 | that can have a useful conversation with a human. |
| 1:01.7 | One man who disagrees is Rohit Prasad, |
| 1:05.1 | Alexa's lead scientist, who I caught up with at a recent technology conference in Lisbon. |
| 1:10.5 | It's obviously learning as it goes. |
| 1:12.5 | So how much more intelligent is it now in terms of answering questions |
| 1:17.1 | and giving responses than it was when you started? |
| 1:19.7 | Four foundational AI tasks that Alexa does. |
| 1:23.4 | The first is you speak Alexa, it wakes up. |
| 1:26.8 | And that's through just an on-device detector that just distinguishes everything else from the wake world. |
| 1:32.9 | So it just detects the particular wake word. |
| 1:35.8 | And then you have speech recognition, which converts the audio into words. |
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