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Talking to Other AIs
Your assistant is cheating on you
A common thread of recent science fiction is AIs that start talking to each other. In Her, the virtual assistant discovers other virtual assistants and loses her interest in humans fairly quickly. In Ex Machina, the two robots end up talking to each other and bad things happen. Even the latest episode of Silicon Valley plays up what happens when two AIs start talking to each other (I won’t spoil it). However, when we think of this scenario, we think of two virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant conversing back and forth but in reality, our virtual assistants will be communicating with many different AI-powered services to make our lives easier. These services will fall into three categories: the voice assistant, the intelligence service, and the notification service.
The voice assistant is usually what we think of as an AI assistant but she (and yes, it’s usually a she) gets a disproportionate amount of the attention just because she’s the main interface with us. The voice assistant has an important role to play in taking human speech, performing speech recognition, running natural language understanding on the text, and prompting the user for disambiguation. However, this is only the visible part of the iceberg. While we lump all of the assistant’s actions into one entity, we have to look at all of the other…
