AI That Can Argue and Instruct

Today's digital assistants can sometimes fool you into believing they are human, but vastly more capable digital helpers are on their way. Behind the scenes, Siri, Alexa and their ilk use sophisticated speech-recognition software to figure out what you are requesting and how to provide it, and they generate natural-sounding speech to deliver scripted answers matched to your questions. Such systems must first be "trained"--exposed to many, many examples of the kinds of requests humans are likely to make--and the appropriate responses must be written by humans and organized into highly structured data formats. That work is time-consuming and results in digital assistants that are restricted in the tasks they can perform. The systems can "learn"--their machine-learning capabilities allow them to improve their matching of incoming questions to existing answers--but to a limited extent. Even so, they are extremely impressive.