Chatting with Einstein all relative
A ‘‘virtual’’ Albert Einstein has entertained more than 10,000 people around the world, days after being put online by Auckland software company Uneeq.
The company created the virtual human, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, in part to test the ‘‘power of personality’’ in virtual companions when it comes to helping combat social isolation.
Uneeq’s partnerships director Simon Grieve said the response had exceeded its expectations and Uneeq had to rush to double its capacity with cloud services provider Amazon Web Services, which is hosting the virtual Einstein, to keep up with the demand for quizzes and conversations.
Uneeq is also behind digital barrister ‘‘Bella’’ and ‘‘Sophie’’, a bot designed to inform people about Covid and combat misinformation about the virus. ‘‘Our goal is to create ‘tech for good’,’’ Grieve says.
‘‘We were surprised to learn that pre-Covid one in four adults had suffered from the effects of social isolation, which has heightened health risks associated with it.’’
Einstein ‘‘made sense’’ as a virtual companion because he is such an immediately recognisable figure across generations, he says.
Perhaps don’t expect the AI tool to unlock the secrets of the universe for you, though.
‘‘Does the fact the universe is not in a constant state prove it has never been in one, including nothingness, and therefore that ‘time’ is infinite?’’
Virtual Einstein wasn’t equipped to chip in to my recent topic of dinner-time conversation unfortunately, and nor was it ready to comment on whether and how the universe would ‘‘end’’.
‘‘What is the relationship between time and space?’’, also appeared to stump the virtual Einstein, though to be fair I don’t think I understood my own question.
But the virtual Einstein has 350 curated programmed responses as well as access to facts from US knowledge engine WolframAlpha and an open source quiz engine.