How about a 24/7 luxury concierge? AI AI, Captain!

“Ifeel like my child is being born today,” Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence said at the World Government Summit yesterday. Day 1 of the WGS saw the unveiling of an idea whose time has come. Imagine how sorted your life would be if you had a concierge, a sort of personal genie, who’d get things done for you in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. While that may already be true for the well-heeled, who can afford to spend a small fortune on such personalised service, even they (the Richie Rich) still have to tell the concierge about what they want, when and how. Now imagine that, for a fraction of what the deeppocketed may be spending for that service, you can not only have a personal concierge on call anytime, but also one that understands your tastes and needs and wants (or learns them within no time), and doesn’t forget anything at all, ever.

At the WGS in Dubai on Sunday, American musician-turned tech entrepreneur will.i.am, a.k.a. William James Adams, Jr., announced Omega, an AI-powered personal concierge that lives with you (in the form of an app on your mobile) and interacts with you like a personal assistant with “human feel.” The Arabic-enabled Omega will be the face (rather voice) of conversational computing, which is the next tech frontier for humans to conquer. Of course, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, the Google Assistant, and a whole lot of other AI-powered assistants do that, but Omega is more sophisticated in that it doesn’t have to switch between apps to assist users, and offers solutions “as fast as voice command”. Dubai’s chutzpah coupled with will.i.am’s charisma and AI’s intellect will make sure that Al Olama’s child (Omega) is happily adopted in not just this part of the world, but in the entire world.