This year has been incredible, accelerating so much what we do in technology and digital, and at the same time driving this idea that we are all going to be more tech enlightened. This Tech Enlightenment/Adoption is just the first step into transforming into a digital business. It is also about how you nurture the skills of the people that drive the innovation process and manifest it into your business. These recent times have shown us that having a greater purpose is critical. As this reshaping occurs every successful organisation will contemplate its purpose. Purpose-driven digital aligns technology innovation with an organisation’s capabilities to drive business and societal outcomes. Purpose is what fuels us all as human beings. And so too our youth are looking for purpose in their careers more than ever.
So we have purpose driving digital progress and this is creating all kinds of new innovation as the User Interface moves from our Smart Phones to more Ambient experiences, driving by voice and AI assisted technologies like Intelligent Digital Assistants and Understanding. The new era of Mixed Reality, where Interaction Design becomes Cognitive Knowledge and Understanding, the new killer app will be intelligence.
And today in a digital context, it is time to imagine the rise of AI, Deep Learning, Machine Learning and how this will make our lives more Human in an inclusive and ethical way.
AI is making the world more inclusive, I work closely with my colleague who is low sighted and he uses Seeing AI to see the world around him, using Image Recognition to help recognise the emotion of people around him, read hand written cards and help him to dress all of this being – well truly life changing. And can download it to on IoS Seeing AI.
The human ability to see, to hear, to smell, is being converted to cognitive intelligence- the ability to reason, to learn and to acquire knowledge. The same computer vision technology in Seeing AI is now being used to solve unique business problems.
Uber is now partnering with Microsoft to verify their drivers and Shell is using Video Analytics in their retail outlets to predict and detect unsafe actions in store fronts.
Xiaolce (‘Showice’) a celebrity in China – she has 40 million friends who she talks with. She even reads the weather nightly on one of China’s largest new stations. Xiaolce is a deep learning bot who was created in a Microsoft hackathon, works with WeChat, and is special because she cares with IQ and EQ which enables her to form strong relationships with human being.
What we learned from Xioice is that people want their tech to be approachable and to adjust to the way we communicate. Now Deep Learning is being used to power customer service and support at HP, Microsoft with our own Virtual Assistant, Vodafone and many more. This year we have launched our COVID symptom checker which has helped over 1700 Health Care Bots in 23 countries, check out Humans and AI through Hadas in the video below..
You too can use these cognitive services when thinking about the digital experiences you want to create for your customers and constituents. Build in Speech Recognition, Language Translation, Forms Recognition and Knowledge. Imagine being able to crack open contracts, pdf’s, and unstructured data and enrich with other data to create a new way to surface Knowledge – That is Knowledge Mining. This new concept and how this is being used across industries to create new experience and help us to create vital insights from our data.
Today, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what people and machines, working together, can accomplish. Scientists, engineers and programmers are using these AI capabilities to solve one of the world’s most vexing challenges and we call it AI for Good, including ‘AI For Earth’ enabling the protection of species, the climate and water and improving yield in agriculture by predicting soil health and weather patterns to help crops grow better. AI for Accessibility, to empower people with disabilities with tools to support independence, employment and daily life.
Let the AI Journey Begin as we Sense, Comprehend with Machine Comprehension and then Act with Machine Learning and Virtual Assistant to make a more human world.
Rita Arrigo
(Industry Digital Strategist, Microsoft)