VIRTUALLY INTELLIGENT
6 WAYS TO BUILD YOUR OWN
ARMY OF INTELLIGENT ASSISTANTS
Kathi Vian
2016 Ten-Year Forecast
1 Talk or text…
… to your assistants
The accelerating ability of
computers to process natural
language is driving the
development of intelligent
assistants that can respond to
vocal or text inputs, going
beyond simple look-up
services to meet diverse needs
in the physical as well as
virtual worlds.
WeChat
Secretary: AI
mobile app uses
WeChat
interface to help
foreigners get
services in
Beijing
Source: Bespoke Travel Company
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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2 Get life coaches…
… to be your best self
With the ability to analyze
large amounts of text will
come the ability to analyze
everything from one’s health
records to one’s personality,
and AI-based life coaches will
tap this ability to provide
personal lifestyle guidance,
perhaps hour by hour.
CafeWell Concierge: IBM Watson-empowered
mobile app engages users in health dialogs
based on medical and lifestyle data
Source: Welltok
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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3 Engage your personal PR agent…
… to boost your personal brand
As intelligent agents get
smarter at tracking your
public voice, they will
become personal PR
assistants that “place” you
where you need to be in the
social media scene—and
even coach you on how to
make your social voice more
engaging.
Rantic: Online service helps you build a
following on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and
Facebook
Source: Rantic
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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4 Tap into government services…
… with artificially intelligent help
Intelligent assistants will offer a
more user-friendly interface
between citizens and the complex
bureaucracies of their
governments. These assistants may
even take on personalities that
match your individual political
views and civic goals.
IDA: Natural language interaction assistant
helps Norwegian drivers navigate the Public
Roads Administration
Source: Artificial Solutions
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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5 Get support for your role…
… to keep you professional
As intelligent assistants
proliferate—and as they get more
intelligent—they will develop
abilities to support specific roles,
from doctors and nurses to real
estate agents and even policemen.
They will improve role performance
by identifying opportunities for
refinements and giving a heads-up
when role-related risks increase.
White House Police Data Initiative:
Algorithm predicts when police officers are
likely to turn to violence
Source: Digital Trends
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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6 Automate your automated
assistants…
… to reduce your management burden
As assistants proliferate, users will
become managers of many
assistants, and like many managers,
they will need help coordinating all
those assistants. The market will
likely respond with solutions that
automate the management of
automated assistants.
Messenger’s Chat SDK: Facebook’s
intelligent assistant integrates diverse
intelligent assistants from 3rd-party developers
Source: Cult of Android
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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What’s driving intelligent
assistants?
Decades of research into natural language processing are finally yielding results as supercomputing power
becomes available to interpret large tracts of text or audio. Much more complex than translating one
language into another, this interpretive code translates what is typed or spoken into what is meant. The
result, starting a few years back, was a handful of voice-controlled interfaces that could function as generalpurpose virtual assistants.
Over the next decade, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of special-purpose virtual assistants will emerge
as these interfaces are embedded into all kinds of applications—taking advantage of everything from location
sensing to environmental sensing to mood sensing. Rather than a single general-purpose virtual assistant like
Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now, or Amazon’s Echo, a tech-savvy generation will adopt a multiplicity of assistants to
help them work, learn, eat, exercise, play and even pray better than they can on their own.
These assistants will use natural language processing not just to respond to simple voice requests but to
follow voice and video conversations and scan text in email, chat, text messaging systems, and even notepads
and to-do lists. They will interpret these narrative fragments in the context of sensor data that describes the
user’s physical experience. And from all this data, they will not only figure out what we, as users, want them
to do. They will teach us how to do what we want to do better—and perhaps even shape what we want to do.
continued
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What’s driving virtual assistants? ...continued
Because they will use learning algorithms, they will gradually become more and more personalized. They
will speak to us in our native vernacular. They will recognize our values and aesthetic preferences, our
weaknesses and our strengths. They will know our needs and hopes and goals before we do, teaching us
as much as they serve us.
Perhaps most important, this army of intelligent virtual assistants will be social. Of course, any one of our
assistants will learn to coordinate with our other assistants to keep harmony in our digital households. But
they will also coordinate with the other virtual assistants serving other individuals and organizations in our
networks, discovering how to meet our needs in a complex ecosystem of personal economies and social
contracts. The question is: Will we build some basic social goals into their code? Will we wire them for
both competition and cooperation, as we ourselves are wired? Will we tilt the advantage toward the
individual or the collective?
Most likely, the culture of virtual assistants that emerges as these digital intelligences proliferate will be a
culture that reflects the people they serve—as competitive and cooperative, as task-driven and creative as
we as a society are. It’s possible, however, that as they learn about us, we will also learn about ourselves.
And seeing who we are, we will engage our assistants to help us be not just our best selves but our best
humanity.
©2016 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | SR-1865
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