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Witai founder and CEO Alex Lebrun presented at June's edition of Hardwired NYC. Wit.ai is a natural language for the internet of things.
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PRESENTERS AT JUNE’S EDITION OF HARDWIRED INCLUDED:
SAM WURZEL@OCTOPART
ALEX LEBRUN @LXBRUN@WITNLSHAI SCHECHTER @SHAISCHECHTER @DELTAPRINTRJAMES SIMINOFF@TEAMDOORBOTJARED SCHIFFMAN @JAREDSCHIFFMAN @PERCHNYC
MATT TURCK @MATTTURCK@FIRSTMARKCAP
#HARDWIREDNYC
2001-2012Cofounder and CEO@VirtuOz (Nuance Communications)“Intelligent” Virtual Agents for Customer Care(AT&T, eBay, H&R Block, Coca Cola…)
2013-…Cofounder and [email protected] for developershttps://wit.ai
Teaching Natural Language to Machines
Human fascination with talking machines
Hephaestus, Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes.
The Turing Test (1950)
Computing, Machinery and Intelligence‘I propose to consider the question: “Can machines think?” (…)’
ELIZA (1966)
HAL 9000 (1968)
KITT (1980)
Real world speech in 2014• Cars• Interactive Voice Response (call centers)• Smartphones (Siri / Google Now / Cortana)
10B voice-first devices by 2018
Yet, voice commands are the future
Why is this so difficult (1)• Two categories of users– “Once bitten, twice shy”– Unrealistic expectations
Why is this so difficult (2)• It’s a hard AI problem: noise, accents,
variations, context, common sense, latency
Speechrecognition
Semanticanalysis
Action Responsegeneration
Text tospeech
Analytics &adaptation
Why is this so difficult (3)• Unlike a GUI, a speech interface doesn’t set
expectations about what it can/cannot do
What’s new?• Major breakthroughs in speech recognition– Deep neural networks– More training data
• Smart devices / wearables / home automation– Limited, well defined scope
• API + Community approaches
Word Errror Rate
Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope– What is the set of commands?– Background noise, type of microphone, distance– Cloud vs. embedded processing
Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations– How to convey the message about what your
device can and cannot do?– Might be obvious. If not, we need to educate
users
Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations• Adapt to users, don’t ask users to adapt to you– Don’t spend too much time with specs– Wizard of Oz approach– Analytics and continuous learning
Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations• Adapt to users, don’t ask users to adapt to you• Let you device/app be proactive
