Many of us will ask Siri or Alexa to help us out at home with everything from directions to cooking instructions and playing our favourite music. But can these types of personal assistants be useful in the workplace to make knowledge workers more efficient and help them in their day-to-day tasks? Technologies that learn from human workers through a combination of example and instruction should be seamless to use and feel like collaborators that understand something about what's happening and can make a valuable contribution.
At PARC, we are looking at the combination of technology and people – as opposed to simply automating through technology – and making useful conversational interactions. Some things are already helpful. For example, you can add an appointment to your calendar with a moderate saving in time.
But to be true collaborators requires a deeper understanding of communication. Giving commands to devices or getting answers to questions are simple, even superficial interactions. The more complicated interactions can collect information to place an order. But even more interesting is when a bot and a person have a shared goal and they try to work together to achieve it.
Another interesting type of interaction is with diagnosis. There are many use-cases, but it distils down to a problem where the cause and solution are unknown, and a person can only describe symptoms.
There are several challenges to migrating the technologies we're seeing for consumers to knowledge workers within organisations. For example, there aren't ready-made knowledge bases for individual organisations, which is possibly the biggest obstacle to deploying intelligent assistants in the enterprise. Accessing a wide range of useful knowledge for organisations is specific to each one and it's very expensive to create.
Building Knowledge
To make useful assistants in the enterprise, it's not enough to focus just on how we interact with them. The reality of machine learning and artificial intelligence in general is that they're only as good as the data they learn from or depend on for intelligence. For intelligent assistants, knowledge bases are paramount. When Amazon released the Echo, they made use of Evi, a knowledge base and semantic search engine. There are lots of other knowledge bases from Freebase and Wikipedia to Google's Knowledge Graph. These have been a boon for agents that need to answer general knowledge questions.
