Microsoft Prepares Desktop AI

Microsoft is hoping that their Windows operating system may yet be the shape of things to come as they prepare for an AI powered version of the personal assistant. According to this report from The New York Times, they envision an artificially-intelligent avatar as your interface to a powerful personal assistant program that can interpret your mood and expressions while making your appointments, sorting your e-mail and taking care of other routine tasks:

Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one. Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling a flight. More compelling, however, is Laura’s ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments. Instead of being a relatively dumb terminal, Laura represents a nuanced attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years.

I think this is a worthy effort, but if Google ever creates a cloud based avatar interface for standard search, they may leapfrog Microsoft as consumers will probably prefer quick efficiency over a digital relationship. And with Google, they would probably figure out the relationship part (sustained by a steady diet of cookies and datamining) eventually. Of course, Google has no comparable project in the works that I know of, so perhaps this is one innovation in which Microsoft will take the early lead.

Here is more on the project:

Comments

[Lawrence Perry]

Just like Laura, a Virtual Personal Assistant also undergoes training and development under his/her own time and using his/her own resources.