Most people talk about AI in very broad terms. The reality, however, is the artificial intelligence we have now is very different to the AI we see in the movies, i.e. AI where robots and machines are conscious, can deal with a myriad of situations, and have emotion. Specifically, the AI we have today is known as Narrow AI or Weak AI. The AI we want to get to in the future is General AI, also known as Strong AI.

Summary: Contextually intelligent, NLP-based interactive assistants are one of the next big things for AI/ML. The tech is already here from recommendation engines. The need to be more efficient and to become AI-augmented in our decision making is now. Getting the contextual awareness is the hard part. Last week we took the position that from a technical standpoint, 'deeply inclusive and contextually sensitive' AI is one of the two'next big things' in AI.

For generations healthcare has been episodic – someone gets sick or breaks a bone, they see a doctor, and then they might not see another one until the next time they get sick or injured. Now, as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence open up new possibilities for the healthcare industry in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, policymakers and practitioners are developing new ways to deliver continuous healthcare for better outcomes. Consumers already expect access to healthcare providers to be as smart and easy as online banking, retrieving boarding passes and making restaurant reservations, according to Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard J Tyson. Nearly three-quarters of Americans with health insurance (72%), for example, say it's important that their health insurance provider uses modern communication tools, such as instant message and two-way video. Innovative healthcare organizations such as Kaiser Permanente are listening.

This is a deep-dive into one of the problems we face when we model dialogue: understanding mentions of people's names in a restaurant booking system. This article presents how we approached the problem and solved it using some creative neural network structures. At PolyAI, we use datasets of billions of conversations and unstructured natural language texts to learn powerful deep neural models of conversational response. These models allow us to embed any conversational context or response into a shared high-dimensional vector space, so we can retrieve relevant responses, answers, entities and even photos from large databases comprising in-domain knowledge. Comparison of embedding vectors can also facilitate intent detection, i.e. classification of spoken language into specific categories such as'make a booking' or'confirm booking'. In this way, we can exploit a large ranker model and its internal implicit semantic vector space to solve many of the problems in dialogue, without hand-designing any explicit semantic structures like dialogue acts.

Now it's time for All Tech Considered. SHAPIRO: We've spent the last few weeks taking stock of the changes 2018 brought to the tech world and our relationship with the technology we use every day. Now let's look at one particular advancement. The voice of artificial intelligence took a big step forward this year. SIRI: My name is Siri.

Google has released its artificial intelligence chat agent, Duplex into the wider world despite initial criticism over the technology. Google has expanded the remit of the chat agent, which can arrange appointments over the phone from a'small set of trusted users', to a'small group' of Google Pixel phone owners, who are able to use the service in order to secure restaurant reservations in'select cities'. Other users can still access the app, but only'trusted' testers are able to use the full system. If you're not in the group it is likely you will get an error message which says: 'Sorry, I can't call to make reservations for you yet, but here's their phone number.' A spokesperson from Google had confirmed the update to VentureBeat, but clarified that the technology is not what was debuted at the company's conference in May. Google Assistant can only place calls in English, however it is no longer limited to businesses with which Google has explicitly partnered.

Google has announced that Duplex -- the incredible AI system that allows Google Assistant to make real world calls on users' behalf for things like restaurant reservations -- will be available starting next month on a city-by-city basis for Google Pixel users, with Wired reporting that the service is planned to hit New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco by the end of this year. First announced at Google I/O earlier this year, Duplex uses an incredibly, almost uncannily natural-sounding human voice, complete with with "umms" and "ahhs," to intelligently handle real-world tasks for you that Google Assistant otherwise couldn't manage through the internet. Back at I/O, Google said that it was working on testing Duplex over the summer in three specific areas: calls about holiday hours, restaurant reservations, and hair cut appointments, but according to Wired's report, Duplex will only call restaurants that don't already take online reservations to start. Additionally, Wired notes that Google now has a policy that Duplex will always reveal that it's not actually a real person when calling, which should help assuage concerns over the bot's potentially deceptive nature. But there's still a lot we don't know about Duplex's rollout, including which devices (will Google be enabling it for just the Pixel 3, or all Pixels?) or when it's rolling out, but Google did promise that more details would be forthcoming, so hopefully it won't be long before we know more.

When Google first introduced its phone-calling digital concierge Duplex in May, some thought it sounded too human, while others worried that it would secretly record calls with people. The AI's first demonstration at a Google Developer conference prompted a massive backlash against the technology. Now, Google says it has been working to address these concerns - and plans to release it to owners of its new Pixel 3 handset within weeks. Buyers of Google's new Pixel 3 handset in some US cities will be the first to get access to Google Duplex, an AI that can make calls to restaurants and other firms on behalf of users Google's Duplex now identifies itself in a few different ways. In one sample call, Duplex began, 'Hi, I'm calling to make a reservation.

I was in a Brooklyn restaurant the other week and overheard a young man -- definitely a millennial like myself -- arguing with an older couple, most likely his parents, about a variety of topics: healthcare, the point of full-time employment, phones. He really hates using the phone, and to prove just how unnecessary it's become, he pointed to Google Duplex. Google Duplex is a new AI assistant that performs tasks over the phone like booking a haircut or making a restaurant reservation, and its unveiling at Google's developer event in May made for what the Verge called "perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment" of CEO Sundar Pichai's keynote speech (skip ahead to 35:00). In a replay of a real phone conversation with a restaurant employee, a shockingly human-sounding robot booked a reservation, negotiating misunderstandings over the date and number of people without missing a beat. Pichai said at the time that Google Duplex was years in the making, and today, a fully functional version of the technology is still a ways off.

Silicon Valley's quest for artificial intelligence has led it to build self-driving cars, drones, and robots that can do back flips. But often that journey has come down to something much more prosaic, such as ordering a pizza -- or booking a restaurant reservation. Duplex is the company's next-generation virtual helper. When the company first showcased it at its developer conference in May, it engaged in conversation so lifelike -- complete with humanlike "ums" and pauses -- that the person on the other end of the call couldn't tell that the speaker was just software. Some asked whether the interaction was fake.