AI Might Not Be Your Best Source for Advice Just Yet

Virtual assistants are wonderful at following your commands but absolutely terrible at giving life advice. Tidio editor Kazimierz Rajnerowicz spent over 30 hours asking half a dozen popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice assistants and chatbots all kinds of questions and concluded that while virtual assistants are great at retrieving facts, they aren't advanced enough to hold a conversation. "AI today is pattern recognition," explained Liziana Carter, founder of conversational AI start-up Grow AI, to Lifewire in a conversation over email. "Expecting it to advise whether robbing a bank is right or wrong is expecting creative thinking from it, also known as AI General Intelligence, which we're far from right now." Rajnerowicz thought of the experiment in response to forecasts by Juniper Research that predicts the number of AI voice assistant devices in use will exceed the human population by 2024. "... a better approach may be to use that power to gain back time to spend on the things that make us unique as humans."