Video: More Targeted Knowledge Can Improve Today's VAs
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Deborah Dahl: One thing that's really great about today's artificial systems is they know a lot, and we saw that example with the Phillies. They know a lot about generic information, and there are a lot of resources for generic information. I think knowledge graphs are the most popular.
There's also the DBpedia, which is kind of a structured version of Wikipedia. There's Wolfram Alpha and another academic one called Cyc. There's a lot of generic knowledge available in structured forms that we can tap into to build these systems. But they're already pretty good with generic knowledge.
Where they start to be less good is with enterprise information. You can't just go to some website and find out about your company's products and inventory and employees and retail locations. That's all something that has to be taught to the virtual assistant if you want it to build an enterprise application that could answer those kinds of questions. So, most of the time a lot of that information is in databases, and the problem is hooking that database up to the virtual assistant, and that can involve a lot of work.
The other kind of information that's hard to get is personal information about the user. That's "How do I take my coffee, what's my route to work?" Any kind of personal information that's useful in an application. We don't have a good way to acquire that.
I can see three ways to acquire it; none of them are perfect. One is when the user sets up an application, go through some kind of quiz, which can get really tedious. "What's your name? Do you have any siblings? "What kind of car do you drive? "Tell me about your route to work."
People don't have a lot of patience for that. The second one is the system can learn through interacting. And that can be used to learn things that maybe the user isn't even aware of, like their average commute time.
Maybe they don't really pay attention to it, but the system can learn that. The problem with that is it needs to be set up to do that, and it might take awhile to learn all the things that it would be good for it to learn. And the third way to get information about the user is mining the web for information about you. That's pretty creepy. I don't think you would be very happy if your virtual assistant suddenly said, "Oh, how's your sister Gretchen? "I see she posted on Facebook."
People are used to the automated systems knowing where they are, so that's not too creepy. But there's a lot of information about everybody on the web and you have to be careful about mining it.
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