What might our lives be like if smart digital assistants could take over the mind-numbing tasks that rob us of time and sap our creative energy? The Opus Research team got a glimpse into that future during a conversation last week with x.ai’s CEO and founder Dennis Mortensen.

Mortensen envisions a world in which we’ll all have one or two favorite personal assistants with whom we interact all the time and who know all about us and our preferences. Our very close personal assistants will have what Mortensen refers to as broad ”horizontal” capabilities. They’ll be generalists adept at carrying out the broad type of question and answer exchanges that we have with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana today. As soon as we need specialized help, our close personal assistants will engage “vertical” experts trained in specific task areas.

In Mortensen’s view, this world will only be possible if there are people and companies willing to take on the incredible drudgery of building and perfecting the knowledge base that powers these specialized AIs. X.ai has signed up as one of those companies and they are on a mission to free humanity from the painful chore of scheduling meetings once and for all. Setting up meetings, especially those with multiple,  geographically dispersed participants, can be worse than herding cats. Imagine a world where your very own intelligent assistant quickly and flawlessly manages all your meetings for you.

That type of Nirvana doesn’t come easy. As Mortensen pointed out during our conversation, building an expert assistant is a huge technical challenge. To create an AI that can schedule meetings, you have to first construct a conceptual model of the entire “meeting” universe. The model has to include rules about time, locations, people, cancellations, postponements, and much more. If that sounds easy, read Mortensen’s recent blog post, “How to Teach a Machine to Understand Us” to get an appreciation for the technical complexity of the task.

X.ai is constantly working to make their Amy and Andrew assistants smarter. The end goal is to have perfected the conceptual model of the meeting universe to the point where Amy and Andrew can flawlessly schedule even complex meetings, under the most challenging circumstances, with zero human intervention. The entire process from beginning to successful completion will be automated. In that world, when you need to set up a meeting, you’ll simply ask your close “horizontal” personal assistant to take care of it. Your assistant will hand off the task to Amy or Andrew, the go-to experts for automated scheduling, and have them do all the work.

While x.ai is heads down honing the skills of what they aim to be the world’s smartest artificially intelligent meeting assistant, other companies are working on vertical specialists in other domains. Perhaps within the next decade our personal assistants will be able to tap into the expertise of specialized AIs to free us from many of the tasks that bring us no joy. That will leave more time for us to create new products and services and delight our customers. We may even have more time to work on our golf games. Want to play? I’ll have Amy reach out to coordinate tee times.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Personal assistant