Conversation is the ultimate user interface

We may be living in the golden age of information, but finding the right information is still a pain in the neck. My team and I are here to take on this challenge Amazon Alexa building what we believe is the next generation user interface that will redefine the way we interact with technology and find information.

We spend hours each day hunched over phones and laptops. We open and close and reopen apps. We scroll. We type on small QWERTY keyboards. And every time we search the web, we click through an endless sea of ​​blue links. The internet is indeed great. The user interface is not.

We have accepted these terms because, since the beginning of the digital age, this is all we know. But these methods of interacting with the digital universe have been developed to serve business models, not user experience. They are designed to increase the amount of time you spend online, boost click-throughs, and maximize engagement time. But it’s unfair to let people seek information this way. And it’s time to move on.

Conversation: The age-old interface

The first step is to change the way we interact with the internet. And thankfully, recent advancements in AI enable an entirely new user interface. In fact, it is the original interface, which we have been using for almost two million years. It’s called “conversation.”

No speech, mind you. We’ve been using that for almost a decade, interacting with our phones and digital assistants like Alexa. I’m talking about real, human-like conversations. The kind you might have with a friend over a beer, where vague or poorly worded questions are understood. Conversations in which intent is derived and answers to questions are summarized and personalized.

When two people talk to each other, they understand each other’s context and pick up on visual cues. Conversations can be concise and efficient. Or they can cover different topics, change direction and lead to chance discoveries. People do this without even thinking about it. But to teach a machine to do this will require significant advancements in the science of AI. This isn’t just about its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, which rapidly improve with every voice interaction (Alexa alone receives over a billion requests each week from hundreds of millions of devices in more than 17 languages).

AI within milliseconds

On the contrary, if a machine is to learn the give and take nature of a conversation, our current information retrieval system needs to be fundamentally rethought, including the ability to search billions of web pages in real time (web-scale neural information retrieval). summarizing information from the vastness of the web (automated summary), and the ability to recognize an end user’s intent and recommend additional relevant content (using contextual recommendation engines).

Conversational interfaces require these systems (and more) to work together seamlessly and directly. For example, if you ask an AI assistant, “Where is the world’s oldest living tree?” it should not only be able to answer that question quickly and concisely, but also understand that you’re currently only an hour away from that tree, and then provide directions and recommendations on hiking trails in the area.

Or if you watch the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday Night Football and vaguely ask, “Who just caught that pass?” it should be able to deduce what game you’re watching, which team is on offense, who caught the pass and for how many yards. All within milliseconds.

These are difficult, unprecedented problems. As such, Amazon has assembled a team of world-class AI scientists dedicated to solving them. We invest in these assets because we believe these capabilities represent the future of human-machine interaction. And we’re not the only ones.

“These give-and-take interactions build relationships that will shape both the user and the system,” said Hae Won Park, a research scientist at MIT’s personal robots group. “Relational agents can disrupt domains such as personal assistance, healthcare, aging, education and more. We are only now beginning to realize the benefits for the user.”

Towards “environmental intelligence”

Indeed, conversational AI can benefit any business interested in changing the way their customers or employees interact with digital information. And like so many of the AI ​​advancements first developed in the service of Alexa – such as Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly – we expect to make these capabilities fully available to every company, in every industry, through the AI ​​services available. on AWS.

The end goal is to shift the burden of retrieving and distilling relevant information from humans to AIs. And by embedding this conversation opportunity in the spaces we live and work in – our kitchens, cars and offices – we can reduce the amount of time we spend staring at phones and laptops. We call this concept “ambient intelligence,” where AI is available all around you, helping you when you need it and even anticipating your needs, but fading into the background when you don’t need it.

In other words, we can still take advantage of the full awesomeness of the Internet while spending far less time on it. As for the business models that rely on small screens, endless scrolling, and a sea of ​​blue links? It’s time for them to adapt to us, not the other way around.

Vishal Sharma is VP of Amazon Alexa AI Information.