Alibaba beats Google with its own voice assistant tech
MONTREAL: Alibaba’s own voice assistant is largely seen as superior to Google’s corresponding tech.
During the 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems conference here, one of the largest annual gatherings for AI research, Alibaba demonstrated the AI (artificial intelligence) customer service agent for its logistics company Cainiao. Jin Rong, the dean of Alibaba’s Machine Intelligence and Technology Lab, said the agent is already servicing millions of customer requests a day.
The pre-recorded demo call involved the agent asking a customer where he wanted his package delivered. In the backand-forth exchange, the agent successfully navigated several conversational elements that demonstrated the breadth of its natural-language capabilities.
Translated from Mandarin, this was how the demo went:
Agent: Hello, I am Cainiao’s voice assistant. I am— Customer: Hello. A: Yes, hi, you have package scheduled for morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Is it convenient for you to receive? C: Who are you? A: I am Cainiao’s voice assistant. I’d like to confirm your morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Does that work for you?
C: I’m not home in the morning.
A: Then do you have another address that you’d like to use?
Within 30 seconds, the agent has smoothly handled three common, and tricky, conversational ingredients: interruption, nonlinear conversation, and implicit intent.
The non-linear conversation occurs when the customer asks, “Who are you?” This requires the agent to register that the customer is not answering the preceding question but rather starting a new line of inquiry. In response, the agent reintroduces itself before returning to the original question.
The implicit intent occurs when the customer responds, “I’m not home in the morning.” He never explicitly says what he actually means—that home delivery won’t work—but the agent is able to read between the lines and follow up sensibly.
These elements may be boringly commonplace in human conversations, but machines often struggle to handle them. That Alibaba’s voice assistant can do so suggests it’s more sophisticated than Google Duplex, judging from similar sample calls demoed by Google. It’s worth noting, however, that Alibaba’s demo call is designed for onstage presentation; the experience could differ in reality.
Currently, the agent is used only to coordinate package deliveries, but Jin said it could be expanded to handle other topics.
In the back-and-forth exchange, the agent (artificial intelligence software) successfully navigated several conversational elements that demonstrated the breadth of its natural-language capabilities.