Hey Siri!

image from Apple.com

‘Talking to Siri is an easier, faster way to get things done. It’s always with you – on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV – ready to help throughout your day. Ask Siri to set an alarm or a destination. Play a song or a voicemail. Send an invite or a love note. Even change the lighting in your room. And the more you use Siri, the better it knows what you need at any moment. Just say it, and Siri does it.’ — from Apple

Apple Siri was the first virtual assistant installed on smartphone, other examples of virtual assistants are Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

What really is a virtual assistant?

screenshot of siri on my iPhone

‘A virtual assistant is an artificial human like representation of an organization. A virtual assistant does not only answer questions – it also tries to hold a conversation, to manage dialogues on issues’ (from Chatbots).

Most of the time when I use Siri, I was mainly looking for food just like what I did on the screenshot provided above. The other reason that I use Siri is because convenience and it saves my time from typing. What I mean by that is I can simply ask Siri to call ‘someone’ rather me scrolling through contact list and look for ‘someone’. How convenient is that!

Spending time talking on the virtual assistant because it is a good example of Artificial Intelligence (AI). When companies employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to provide assistance on users, and the trend of these intelligent personal assistants growing on the market, what it means would be how quickly AI is coping into our everyday life from Siri to self-driving cars.

Many businesses are focusing more on digital network as before, because they came to realized that many consumers are engaging more on digital platforms and social media. When most of the people are engaged and participated more in digital platforms, the data being stored on the Internet is huge, and this is where AI plays a key role. Training machine intelligence can work especially well with large and unstructured data sets because they are based on predictive analytics that get more accurate as the data behind them gets richer, according to Rangers.

Facebook with the face recognition feature, and Google with the machine translation are the examples of machine intelligence.

With such rapid growth on digital and AI, virtual assistant (for example SIRI) will recognize customers by face and voice across channels and partners by the end of 2018, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human and smart agents will manage 40% of mobile interactions by 2020. (from Gartner)

While I was writing this post, I was thinking if a robot posses a brain with intelligence and emotions just like us, with more advantages such as accessing to millions of data in seconds. Will robots replace human beings? And Martin Ford says:

(from Martin Ford)

I think it is just about timing, when AI can replace most of the human workers, especially in jobs that are repetitive, such as manufacturing products in factories because these works do not require high level of knowledge. However, AI will continuously grow as it keep learning, so sooner or later, no only repetition work, but AI could also handle knowledge-based work.

Zoe Ferguson suggests that jobs that are at potential high risk being replaced are simple physical and manual work such as operating machines in factories or farming, then came to accountants, lawyers and even financial services.

From the data given by NS workforce jobs survey for employment shares (2016), the top few jobs that are at potential high risk are jobs that those that Zoe Ferguson suggests in her article, jobs that are simple and can operate based on the knowledge-based AI, as on the market today, warehouse management and self-drive already existed.

source: NS workforce jobs survey for employment shares (2016)