The Next Digital Assistant Is Apple Flavored
June 6, 2017
Amazon Alexa dominated the digital assistant market until Google released Google Assistant. Both assistants are accessible through smart devices, but more readily through smart speakers that react to vocal commands. Google and Amazon need to move over, because Apple wants a place on the coffee table. Mashable explores Apple’s latest invention in, “Apple’s Answer To The Amazon Echo Could Be Unveiled As Early As June.”
Guess who will be the voice behind Apple’s digital assistant? Why Siri, of course! While Apple can already hear your groans, the shiny, new smart speaker will distract you. Apple is fantastically wonderful at packaging and branding their technology to be chic, minimalist, and trendy. Will the new packaging be enough to gain Siri fans? Apple should consider deploying Bitext’s computational linguistic platform that renders human speech more comprehensible to computers and even includes sentimental analysis. This is an upgrade Siri desperately needs.
Apple is also in desperate need to upgrade itself to the increasing demand for smart home products:
Up until now, people married to the Apple ecosystem haven’t had many smart-home options. That’s because the two dominant players, Echo and Google Home, don’t play nice with Siri. So if people wanted to stick with Apple, they only really had one option: Wait it out.
That’s about to change as the new Essential Home will work with Apple’s voice assistant. And, as an added bonus, the Essential Home looks nice. So nice, in fact, that it could sway Apple fans who are dying to get in on the smart-home game but don’t want to wait any longer for Apple to get its act together. “
The new Apple digital assistant will also come with a screen, possibly a way to leverage more of the market and compete with the new Amazon Echo Show. However, I thought the point of having a smart speaker was to decrease a user’s dependency on screen-related devices. That’s going to be a hard habit to break, but it’s about time Apple added its flavor to the digital assistant shelf.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2017
Voice Assistant Apps Have Much Room to Grow
May 31, 2017
Recent excitement around voice assistants is largely based on the idea that, eventually, a thriving app market will develop around them. However, reports Recode, “Alexa and Google Assistant Have a Problem: People Aren’t Sticking with Voice Apps They Try.” Though sales of Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant platforms over the holidays were encouraging, startup VoiceLabs recently issued a report that indicates most apps entice few users to give them a try. Furthermore, those who have dabbled in voice apps have apparently found little to tempt them back. See the article for some statistics or the report for more. Writer Jason Del Rey observes:
The statistics underscore the difficulty Amazon and Google are having in getting Echo and Home owners to discover and use new voice apps on their platforms. Instead, many consumers are sticking to off-the-shelf actions like streaming music, reading audiobooks and controlling lights in their homes.
Those are all good use cases for the voice platforms, but not sufficient to build an ecosystem that will keep software developers engaged and lead to new transformative revenue streams. As a result, the numbers highlight the opportunity for Amazon, Google or others like Apple to stand out by helping both consumers and developers solve these discovery and retention problems.
The founders of VoiceLab see a niche, and they are jumping right into it. Amazon and Google, thus far, supply only limited usage data to would-be app developers, so VoiceLabs is lending them their own voice analytics tool, VoiceInsights. They are counting on the app market to pick up, and are determined to help it along. So far, this tool is free; the company expects to start charging for it once Amazon and/or Google provide a way to monetize apps. When that happens, developers will already be comfortable with VoiceLabs—well played. Probably. Founded in May 2016, VoiceLabs is based in San Francisco.
We, too, are paying close attention to the rise of voice assistants and their related apps. Watch for the debut of our new information service, Beyond Alexa.
Cynthia Murrell, May 31, 2017
IBM (The Great Innovator) Tells India: You Are Not Innovative
May 22, 2017
I don’t know much about India. I have interacted with a handful of Indian entrepreneurs over the years. I owned a bit of a company set up and managed by a fellow from India. He struck me as bright and, I suppose, the word “innovative” suits him. I also spent a little time with the entrepreneur who created Aglaya. This is an outfit which has some technology which struck me as innovative if you think performing wireless intercepts when a person of interest is going about their daily routine innovative. I have had other bump ups over the last 40 years. These ranged from bright nuclear engineers at Halliburton Nuclear to chipper MBAS with good idea when I worked at the fun factory Booz, Allen & Hamilton to the assorted engineers I encountered in my other work.
To sum up, Indian engineers are not much different from engineers from other countries. I assume that parental guidance, curiosity, and being intelligent were the common factor. Country of origin was not exactly a predictor in my experience.
Well, gentle reader, that’s not how IBM perceives innovation from an entire country if the data in “New Study Finds 90% Of Indian Startups Will Fail Because Of Lack Of Innovation” is on the money. IBM allegedly learned that because India (now that’s a generalization) is not innovative, Indian start ups will fail. Pretty remarkable finding from the company which has tallied five years of declining revenue and the wonky Watson Lucene-based confection.
Innovative? IBM and its researchers are convinced that their work is changing the world. Don’t believe me? Ask Watson. I would not ask a shareholder.
I learned from the report about IBM’s research:
India might have become the third largest startup ecosystem, but it lacks successful innovation.
India is a big country. Doesn’t it seem likely that some individuals would attempt to start new firms instead of trying to get a job at the local bank?
IBM and Oxford Economics found that
90% of Indian startups fail within the first five years. And the most common reason for failure is lack of innovation — 77% of venture capitalists surveyed believe that Indian startups lack new technologies or unique business models.
Yeah, but don’t startups have a high mortality rate? Don’t the business models track with legal ways to generate revenue widely used by other countries’ entrepreneurs? Heck, most patents are stuffed with references to prior art? The innovation is the cuteness of the wording in the claims in many cases, right?
You think this is innovative? You are uninformed. IBM’s study verifies the lack of innovation in India. Tear this allegedly innovative building down. Go with an IBM glass “instant building.”
Not only are those Indian entrepreneurs unimaginative when it comes to making money, IBM’s study reports:
Other reasons cited for failure include lack of skilled workforce and funding, inadequate formal mentoring and poor business ethics, according to the study. It’s well known that most Indian startups are prone to emulate successful global ideas, by and large fine tuning an existing model to serve the local need…
With more than a billion people, it seems logical to focus on the market at hand.
But IBM’s data seems to impugn India for other faults; for example:
India doesn’t have meta level startups such as Google, Facebook or Twitter….Unsurprisingly, in 2016, Asian Paints was the only Indian organization in Forbes’ 25 most innovative companies, and Gillette India was among Forbes Top 25 Innovative Growth companies.
Ah, ha. The capitalist tool Forbes includes only one company called by the surprisingly American moniker Gillette India (very creative indeed) is on the Forbes Top 25 innovative growth companies.
A guru may be the source of this insightful comment:
Even in evolving AI technology, Indian entrepreneurs are not pioneers.
But IBM sees the sun peeking through the heavy Indian clouds:
The IBM report adds that while strong government promotion of entrepreneurship has strengthened the startup culture, India’s economic openness and large domestic market are significant advantages.
What’s with IBM and its somewhat negative discussion of India? Is there an IBM Watson skeleton in the Big Blue closet wearing an IBM Watson t shirt? Did IBM’s own initiatives in India fail? Did a senior IBM executive have a bad experience at the decidedly non creative Taj Mahal? Maybe an Indian rug did not match the interior designer’s vision for Armonk carpetland?
That odd ball digit zero. I had a math professor or maybe it was my half crazy relative who may have contributed some non creative ideas to the Kolmogorov Arnold Moser theorem who told me that some Indian number crunchers cooked up the idea of a zero. IBM’s report suggests that Brahmagupta’s use of computation with the zero was definitely not innovative. I assume that means my crazed relative was innovative, not autistic, anti social, and usually lost in mathematical wonderland.
IBM is familiar with zeros. That’s the symbol I associate with IBM Watson’s contribution to IBM financial future. IBM is, of course, more innovative. It has lots of patents. Revenue growth? Nah, just money to spend proving that India’s start ups work pretty much like any other country’s start ups. Lots of failures.
Final thought: Why didn’t IBM just ask Watson about India. Why involve humans at all? By the way, where’s IBM’s Alexa, its Pixel phone, or its Facebook social network? Watson, Watson, are you there or just pondering life as an non innovative zero?
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2017
Amazon Aims to Ace the Chatbots
April 26, 2017
Amazon aims to insert itself into every aspect of daily life and the newest way it does is with the digital assistant Alexa. Reuters reports that, “Amazon Rolls Out Chatbot Tools In Race To Dominate Voice-Powered Tech,” explaining how Amazon plans to expand Alexa’s development. The retail giant recently released the technology behind Alexa to developers, so they can build chat features into apps.
Amazon is eager to gain dominance in voice-controlled technology. Apple and Google both reign supreme when it comes to talking computers, chatbots, and natural language processing. Amazon has a huge reach, perhaps even greater than Apple and Google, because people have come to rely on it for shopping. Chatbots have a notorious history for being useless and Microsoft’s Tay even turned into a racist, chauvinist program.
The new Alexa development tool is called Alexa Lex, which is hosted on the cloud. Alexa is already deployed in millions of homes and it is fed a continuous data stream that is crucial to the AI’s learning:
Processing vast quantities of data is key to artificial intelligence, which lets voice assistants decode speech. Amazon will take the text and recordings people send to apps to train Lex – as well as Alexa – to understand more queries.
That could help Amazon catch up in data collection. As popular as Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices are, such as Echo speakers, the company has sold an estimated 10 million or more.
Amazon Alexa is a competent digital assistant, able to respond to vocal commands and even offers voice-only shop via Amazon. As noted, Alexa’s power rests in its data collection and ability to learn natural language processing. Bitext uses a similar method but instead uses trained linguists to build its analytics platform.
Whitney Grace, April 26, 2017
Watson and Block: Tax Preparation and Watson
April 19, 2017
Author’s Note:
Tax season is over. I am now releasing a write up I did in the high pressure run up to tax filing day, April 18, 2017, to publish this blog post. I want to comment on one marketing play IBM used in 2016 and 2017 to make Watson its Amazon Echo or its Google Pixel. IBM has been working overtime to come up with clever, innovative, effective ways to sell Watson, a search-and-retrieval system spiced with home brew code, algorithms which make the system “smart,” acquired technology from outfits like Vivisimo, and some free and open source search software.
IBM Watson is being sold to Wall Street and stakeholders as IBM’s next, really big thing. With years of declining revenue under its belt, the marketing of Watson as “cognitive software” is different from the marketing of most other companies pitching artificial intelligence.
One unintended consequence of IBM’s saturation advertising of its Watson system is making the word “cognitive” shorthand for software magic. The primary beneficiaries of IBM’s relentless use of the word “cognitive” has been to help its competitors. IBM’s fuzziness and lack of concrete products has allowed companies with modest marketing budgets to pick up the IBM jargon and apply it to their products. Examples include the reworked Polyspot (now doing business as CustomerMatrix) and dozens of enterprise search vendors; for example, LucidWorks (Really?), Attivio, Microsoft, Sinequa, and Squirro (yep, Squirro). IBM makes it possible for competitors to slap the word cognitive on their products and compete against IBM’s Watson. I am tempted to describe IBM Watson as a “straw man,” but it is a collection of components, not a product.
Big outfits like Amazon have taken a short cut to the money machine. The Echo and Dot sell millions of units and drive sales of Amazon’s music and hard goods sales. IBM bets on a future hint of payoff; for example, Watson may deliver a “maximum refund” for an H&R Block customer. That sounds pretty enticing. My accountant, beady eyed devil if there ever were one, never talks about refunds. He sticks to questions about where I got my money and what I did with it. If anything, he is a cloud of darkness, preferring to follow the IRS rules and avoid any suggestion of my getting a deal, a refund, or a free ride.
Below is the story I wrote a month ago shortly after I spent 45 minutes chatting with three folks who worked at the H&R Block office near my home in rural Kentucky. Have fun reading.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2017
IBM Watson is one of Big Blue’s strategic imperatives. I have enjoyed writing about Watson, mixing up my posts with the phrase “Watson weakly” instead of “Watson weekly.” Strategic imperatives are supposed to generate new revenue to replace the loss of old revenues. The problem IBM has to figure out how to solve is pace. Will IBM Watson and other strategic imperatives generate sustainable, substantial revenue quickly enough to keep the company’s revenue healthy.
The answer seems to be, “Maybe, but not very quickly.” According to IBM’s most recent quarterly report, Big Blue has now reported declining revenues for 20 consecutive quarters. Yep, that’s five years. Some stakeholders are patient, but IBM’s competitors are thrilled with IBM’s stratgegic imperatives. For the details of the most recent IBM financials, navigate to “IBM Sticks to Its Forecast Despite Underwhlming Results.” Kicking the can down the road is fun for a short time.
The revenue problem is masked by promises about the future. Watson, the smart software, is supposed to be a billion dollar baby who will end up with a $10 billion dollar revenue stream any day now. But IBM’s stock buybacks and massive PR campaigns have helped the company sell its vision of a bright new Big Blue. But selling software and consulting is different from selling hardware. In today’s markets, services and consulting are tough businesses. Examples of companies strugglling to gain traction against outfits like Gerson Lehrman, unemployed senior executives hungry for work, and new graduates will to do MBA chores for a pittance compete with outfits like Elastic, a search vendor which sells add ons to open source software and consulting for those who need it. IBM is trying almost everything. Still those declining revenues tell a somewhat dismal tale.
I assume you have watched the Super Bowl ads if not the game. I just watched the ads. I was surprised to see a one minute, very expensive, and somewhat ill conceived commercial for IBM Watson and H&R Block, the walk in store front tax preparer.
The Watson-Block Super Bowl ad featured this interesting image: A sled going downhill. Was this a Freudian slip about declining revenues?
Does it look to you that the sled is speeding downhill. Is this a metaphor for IBM Watson’s prospects in the tax advisory business?
One of IBM’s most visible promotions of its company-saving, revenue-gushing dreams is IBM Watson. You may have seen the Super Bowl ad about Watson providing H&R Block with a sure-fire way to kill off pesky competitors. How has that worked out for H&R Block?
HonkinNews for April 18, 2017 Now Available
April 18, 2017
From the friendly skies of rural Kentucky, this week’s HonkinNews talks about the benefits of a visit to Louisville, Kentucky. Injuries are possible. HonkinNews report that a mid tier consulting firm has decided that people do not search. When you look for information online, you really “insight.” Yep, that sounds pretty crazy to Beyond Search as well. Even more startling are the companies the thrashing consulting firm identifies as leaders in “insight.” Spoiler: Recorded Future, Palantir Technologies, and other companies of this ilk are not included. Why? Insight means enterprise search. HonkinNews also take a quick look at what we call the “high school science club disorder” or HSSCD. Although not on the list of official medical conditions, we report on some striking parallels between Stephen E Arnold’s high school science club in 1958 and Google’s response to allegations from the US Department of Labor about Google’s compensation plan. From the Beyond Alexa service, HonkinNews recycles some information about must-use Amazon Alexa skills. Fancy some Eastern philosophy or words from fashionistas. You will learn what to have Alexa deliver for your auditory delight. A technological news flash about pizza adds flavor to this week’s show. You will want to use DRU to get your slice. No, DRU is not based on “drool”, although one of the Beyond Search team does droll when someone mentions pizza. DRU is a Domino Robotic Unit. Yummy. HonkinNews speculates about a rumored “new” functions for those who write using Microsoft Word. If you like Windows 10’s start menu ads, you will love LinkedIn information displayed next to that memo you are trying to finish so you can leave early. View the program to find out if Clippy will return. You can view the program here.
NB. One viewer of the program wanted to know why the program is in black and white and is pretty lousy. The reason is that we film on a Bell & Howell camera. We are in rural Kentucky, and we use what we have. Enough said. You can “insight” old fashioned eight mm film too.
Kenny Toth, April 18, 2017
HonkinNews for 4 April, 2017 Now Available
April 4, 2017
For April 4, 2017, HonkinNews digs into a shallow article about enterprise search. We did not know that enterprise search illuminates the dark corners of the Internet. We don’t believe this, but that’s why we decided to discuss this flimsy analysis. Also, Snap ephemera are now findable, which means that these gems of knowedge ot disappear quickly. We find some humor in a headhunting outfit which is promoting the name Beyond Search in interesting ways: Dead links and tie ups in Brazil, for example. ISPs can now sell user data. We quote a former FTC big wig who is a master of alliteration. Of course, big ISPs promise not to sell user data. Never. Ever. We discuss a company with technology able to figure out a person’s interests and match ads to that individual. The ads will arrive via an Alexa device or a wheelchair. Finally we illustrate the Google way of answering direct questions. You can find the program at this link.
Kenny Toth, April 4, 2017
IBM Out-Watsons Watson PR
March 15, 2017
I noted that IBM can store data in an atom. I marveled at IBM’s helping with arthritis research. I withdrew my life savings to bet on IBM Watson’s predictions for the next big thing. Wow. Busy that Watson smart software is. Versatile too.
What I found interesting is that IBM has announced that it has knocked the cover off the ball with its speech recognition capabilities. Too bad Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nuance think they know how to perform this Star Trek-type function trick. Clueless pretenders if the IBM assertion is accurate.
Navigate to another IBM “real” journalistic revelation in “Why IBM’s Speech Recognition Breakthrough Maters for AI and IoT.”
I learned:
IBM recently announced that its speech recognition system achieved an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, coming closer to human parity.
Yep, an announcement. Remember. Google’s speech recognition is on lots of mobile phones. Dear old Microsoft, despite the missteps of Tay, landed a deal with the dazed and confused UK National Health Service. And Amazon. Well, there is that Alexa Echo and Dot product line. And IBM? Well, an announcement.
The write up reveals that a blog post makes clear that IBM is improving its speech recognition. As proof, the write up points out that IBM’s error rate declined. IBM does that with its revenues, so maybe this is a characteristic of the Big Blue machine.
But I particularly enjoyed this bit of analysis:
Reaching human-level performance in AI tasks such as speech or object recognition remains a scientific challenge, according to Yoshua Bengio, leader of the University of Montreal’s Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) Lab, as quoted in the blog post. Standard benchmarks do not always reveal the variations and complexities of real data, he added. “For example, different data sets can be more or less sensitive to different aspects of the task, and the results depend crucially on how human performance is evaluated, for example using skilled professional transcribers in the case of speech recognition,” Bengio said.
Isn’t this the outfit which Microsoft relies upon for some of its speech wizardry. So what exactly is IBM doing? Let’s ask Alexa?
Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2017
Amazon, the Walmart of Digital Selling, Is into Smart Software Too
March 3, 2017
Big day. Amazon, the company that reports its financials in a remarkably weird way, is now explaining that it is a player in the smart software poker game. Navigate to “Welcome to the New AWS AI Blog!” Now the DWs (digital Walmarters) are explaining that artificial intelligence, was, is, and will be the future of the mall killer.
How many AI and smart software services does the Main Street shopping pillager offer. Check out this chart:
There are “engines.” One can pay money to use this devices. Some of the names are semi familiar like TensorFlow; others may be unfamiliar to the shopping crowd; for instance, CNTK. Love that acronym.
There are complete platforms. Some of these are open sourcey, but when vendor lock in is one of the possible consequences of the cloud approach to software, one never knows, does one? I like Amazon machine learning and “EMR”, an acronym which means a variant of Google’s old school batch processing thing. Yikes! Batch processing in a zip zip world of real time flows.
The third layer is Amazon AI services. I noted the inclusion of Lex, Amazon’s home companion. Alexa, what’s the weather?
The idea is that Amazon is every bit as robust as some of the other smart software outfits. No less an authority than Mark Cuban is pressed into duty as an objective supporter of Amazon’s freshly repackaged collection of oddments.
The blog, I assume, will explain how those in search of smart software can order up machine learning along with an order of dog food.
Who should be nervous about Amazon’s repackaging of its industry leading cloud services? I would suggest that cross town pal Microsoft might be checking out Amazon’s AI chart. Then, of course, there are the wizards at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I wonder of Amazon’s services will be of use to HPE when it meets up with Autonomy in court later this year. And the number one outfit likely to be consulting tea leaves for hints of Amazon’s AI impact? Good old IBM. Fresh from another quarter of declining revenues and more IBM Watson hyperbole, IBM might be wondering, “How did a digital Walmart get from used CDs to AI?”
And the Google? My hunch is that the Google may note Amazon’s blog. But the company is in the ad business, has been, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Amazon is too diversified to the Google to see many parallels.
My hunch is that Amazon does see search as vulnerable. Another Main Street? Perhaps?
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2017
Beyond Search Evolution Underway
March 1, 2017
Today we are introducing changes to Beyond Search. We are approaching 10 years of daily publication and in that time enterprise search and content processing has undergone a significant change. Enterprise search is no longer exciting. In fact, a number of companies have pivoted to different services. Search has become for many a utility at best or a ho-hum solution. Web search has degraded to the lowest common denominator of generating revenue via ads. The handful of “objective” Web search systems walk a perilous cliff edge between paying their bills and providing an index to a subset of publicly accessible content. We will continue to cover important items in Beyond Search, but we are shifting our focus to products and services related to voice-centric information access.
The Beyond Alexa blog is in its formative stages. We have started to flow content into this new service. It will include Augmentext-type stories (for information follow the link), special articles, short videos on voice related topics, and inclusions (a fancy word for sponsored content or in my lingo, ads with information value). The idea is that Alexa has become an interesting product niche, but the impact of voice-related information access is now changing rapidly. Frankly it is more dynamic than the decades old keyword search business.
You can view the alpha version of Beyond Alexa at this link. As we ramp up the service, we will have other announcements about the service. We passed the 15,000 article milestone in Beyond Search last year. Since early 2008, we have tracked the keyword centric approach to finding and making sense of information. Our changing focus reflects the fact that I wrote about years ago in Searcher Magazine. Keyword search linked to a keyboard, if not dead, was headed for marginalization.
That’s why we want to explore “beyond” Alexa, Amazon’s odd little voice activated box which does a bang up job of providing the temperature and almost friction free impulse shopping. We think there’s more “beyond” Alexa. We want to explore the new world of ubiquitous and Teflon-slick information access.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2017
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