SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Amazon's range of smart speakers and their artificial intelligence assistant Alexa have proved to be a huge sales hit.
"We have thousands of engineers inside Amazon adding to [its] capability every day and then another tens of thousands of developers adding to the skills," he tells the BBC.
"The thing I am sure of is that this time next year she will be significantly more intelligent than she is now, and that sometime in the future we will hit our goal of reinventing the Star Trek computer."
It's a lofty goal, especially since any attempt to go beyond commanding a weather update or asking for the lights to be switched on is currently asking for trouble.
Try to have anything close to a normal conversation with Alexa and it tells you it doesn't understand or cannot help.
But though it may not always be obvious, the firm says rapid progress is being made.
Which will prevail, Alexa, Cortana, or Siri?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @05:27PM
Google is the one major tech company who is not, in any overtly direct fashion, commercializing their AI development. I mean obviously their search, image recognition, and countless other things do utilize AI - but they're not trying to wrap up some facade of intelligence and market it as such along the lines of Alexa, Siri, or Cortana.
This is incredibly conspicuous given Google's incredibly active pursuit of R&D in AI. However, when you look at their [patents](https://www.google.com/patents/US8126832) I think things begin to clear up. Google has a large number of secretive projects in development, and it's quite obvious that their goal is not to compete - but to 'win.' In a way like they did with Google search. They were so far ahead of the competition technologically, that any notion of competition was really destroyed. And I think it's the same thing with AI. Companies like Amazon are trying to simulate artificial intelligence by throwing thousands of engineers at the problem and hoping what's produced, almost as a sort of semi-automated Mechanical Turk [wikipedia.org] (another Amazon product). By contrast, I think Google's goal is to give small teams all the resources in the world and work on genuinely developing artificial intelligence capable of acting with a degree of understanding beyond word association. And I suspect they are also likely to give it a shell that is actually capable of 'physicalizing' its understanding and capabilities. I think that their goal is not to compete, but to revolutionize the market. And, for better or for worse, I think they will succeed.