Are smart speakers artificial general intelligence? Or most commonly known as strong AI?
After owning numerous Google Homes and an Alexa Smart speaker for quite a long time now, I’ve started to wonder about how those awesome voice assistants are built from the ground up.
I mean, their response is so human alike! That’s why I’ve decided to gather cool data in this blog post:
The voice assistants used on any smart speaker possess the ability to answer an immense amount of different questions. Its answers are very close to what a human would say, but the Artificial Intelligence used for the response is still in the early stages to be called AGI.
If you are into comic books and technology you have a glimpse of what AGI or AI is.
Or perhaps you’re curious about how artificial intelligence integrates with Alexa or Google Home (like me).
In the following article, we are going to discuss these topics without boring you to death.
What is Artificial intelligence?
First things first. We need to define this concept before moving forward.
Artificial intelligence in common words is a skill installed in machines where they can take decisions based on their surroundings so it can solve common tasks that a human being would solve easily.
Pretty close to what Alexa or Google Assistant does right?
Both Alexa and Google Assistant can answer any type of question you could think of.
But in my experience, Google Assistant has proven to be more interactive and more analytic when it comes to answering a question.
I did a very cool guide comparing Google Assistant and Alexa in a smart home that you may want to take a look at. It is mainly focused on how they behave at home, take a look!
And it all comes down to the same answer: The Artificial intelligence used by Google to develop this voice assistant is way beyond their competition. Hands down.
It’s crazy that Alexa can answer multiple questions and control the most famous devices in the market right now, but if we are talking about AI is better in Google Labs.
But the thing is that AI keeps growing and growing over the years, that now many of the regular activities that a smart device performs aren’t considered as a “clever decision”
I mean, let’s take a look at face and voice recognition.
A couple of years back, a device that was capable to detect this type of information it had AI built-in
And talking about smart speakers specifically, (at least for Google Assistant) they can sense who is talking to them!
But even though it’s incredible to see it performing, this skill was removed from the AI list.
You may wonder why? Stay with me so we can learn a little bit more.
AI EFFECT
Many of the skills that a smart speaker has to answer queries for their users are no longer considered “smart”
Why?
Because the technology grows by the second.
As we enjoy a couple of coffee reading the news, engineers and data scientists are gathering information to create better ways to improve Artificial intelligence,
making the discoveries from a couple of years back, obsolete.
When software development keeps growing, many of the old characteristics in devices are no longer considered as real intelligence.
Now, another thing to think about is the level of criticism put over any recent AI development.
Scientists suffer a lot from this!
Because any time they discover a new cool way to make a computer do something that a human does easily
It all comes down to:
“that’s not AI, that’s regular computing”
This AI Effect is very controversial. What you call AI a couple of years back, maybe at the moment of reading this article could not be anymore.
This topic is super interesting and you can learn a lot by reading books and articles about it.
But we are going to cover only if: are smart speakers artificial general intelligence?
What is Artificial general intelligence?
Maybe you already have a glimpse of what is AGI at the moment you stumble upon this article.
But it’s important to set a background first so we can continue with the same trend of thought.
AGI is the imaginary idea of a machine learning intellectual tasks that a regular human being would do without a problem.
And the most important part of this definition is the word: imaginary.
Because the ability of a machine to learn a human task without any human intervention is the next step in the evolution process.
Artificial intelligence has its variations: you can call it Strong AI, full AI, or even General Intelligent Action.
Now that we know what AGI is, we can answer: are smart speakers artificial general intelligence?
To know this, we would need to perform certain tests to verify the ability of our cool smart speaker.
Even though these tests aren’t the “holy grail” to define such a complex concept, it’s awesome to learn how we can apply them in our speakers.
In general, there are 4 different tests:
- Turing test.
- The coffee test.
- The Robot college student test.
- The employment test.
And without going any deep into any of them, let me tell you that any smart speaker at the moment is capable to pass these tests.
Artificial General Intelligence is still in early stages and it’s impossible to say right now that a smart voice assistant is capable of having these skills.
It requires that a machine has a huge intellectual level to learn activities from a human by gathering information in their environment.
And for some of us, we could think:
Hey, but Google Assistant is capable of learning certain routines and schedules that I use on my daily basis, that’s considered AGI right?
As discussed above, those learning parameters are far from being considered even AI.
The only way to expect that a smart voice assistant such as Alexa can become part of Strong AI is by adding more senses to the speaker like sight, smell, and taste and take decisions based on 5 different information channels.
I know, this at the moment is far from reality.
But at some point in our lives, we are going to see this kind of technology walking around us.
What is the difference between AI and AGI?
Ok, it can be confusing to differ one from another.
But lets us digest it a little bit so we can understand it better.
AI is a characteristic implemented on a smart device to perform standard human tasks.
Compared to AGI, the same smart devices have to have the ability to make decisions based on their surroundings and behave like a human being without any previous input.
AGI is the ultimate way of a machine to become a helpful tool in our society.
And at the moment, this is not the case for our smart speakers.
When we use them at home, it feels like we are living in the future, but from a scientific perspective
Smart speakers aren’t even close to becoming AGI.
Conclusion
For the question: are smart speakers artificial intelligence?
The straight forward answer is: No.
There are so many factors involved in Strong AGI that it requires a lot of technical development before expecting a smart speaker to behave like devices in the movies.
I would love to experience this technology in our homes and I know at some point our society will see it.