My week with one very bossy robot
Harry Wallop loved his ‘remote’ secretary, until she started emailing people in the middle of the night...
After two decades of being an office worker, I’ve made it: I now have a personal assistant. She’s called Amy Ingram and she’s superefficient, works all hours, though occasionally she emails me in the middle of the night. Also, she refuses to fetch me a cup of coffee or file my expenses. But that is because Amy is a robot, and exists purely as a piece of software, sitting on a server somewhere in America.
She is the latest version of a phenomenon that has taken Silicon Valley by storm: chatbots. These are software programs that are able to communicate with humans through artificial intelligence and, possibly, help run their homes.
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, announced that he was going to dedicate his spare time to building a “simple AI”, similar to Jarvis, the robotic butler in Iron Man. “I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home – music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell,” he explained, adding that the robot could also be used to check up on his baby daughter, Max, when he was away. Last night, he announced, at the F8 Facebook conference, that he would allow thirdparty developers to build chatbots inside its Messenger app. In theory, this would allow users to “talk” directly to businesses rather than people having to go through an app or call customer services.
Depending on your outlook, this is very exciting, or a nightmare straight out of the Channel 4 series Humans, when bots start to interfere with their owners’ lives.
But the revolution has started. Indeed, many of you might already have used a chatbot, in its simplest form, without realising it.
First, there’s Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, mobile phone software that uses very basic artificial intelligence to understand your voice and answer your questions. Also, some companies, such as Ikea, use chatbots to answer standard customer service inquiries when you get in touch to complain. The research firm Gartner estimates that up to 85 per cent of customer service centres will go virtual by 2020.
But AI becomes more interesting when it is used to help ordinary families, rather than companies. Indeed, many believe that bots will replace apps on our smartphones as the ultimate aid to making modern life simpler.
Sabine Hubert, lecturer in robotics at Bristol University, says: “We need to work out where we need help. There are a number of daily tasks that I’d love help with. Something that could summarise all the emails I get sent during a day would be great.”
My secretary, Amy Ingram (AI – geddit?), is designed to help people organise their diaries and set up meetings. That’s all she can do. But she goes about it in a freakishly human-like way. In fact, after using her for a couple of weeks, various contacts of mine – after communicating with her over email – said they had no idea she was not a real person.
For her to do her job, you need to give her access to your electronic diary, set a few preferences (your favourite coffee shops to meet in, for example), and copy her into emails about meetings you want to set up.
She then takes over. Not just by sending out a calendar invite to the person you want to meet, but also by making sure the time fits around both of your schedules, and nudging people to accept the calendar invite. Reminders can also be sent, if you want.
Dennis Mortensen, chief executive of x.ai, the company behind Amy, says there are 10 billion meetings in the US every year, and his invention can reduce the tens of billions of emails that ping-pong between people to set them up.
What is remarkable is how Amy “chats” to your contacts about whether they’d prefer a coffee meeting, or clarifying the address of where you are meeting. All emails sound as if they are written by a human – until she starts to email your contacts at two in the morning, telling them that they really need to confirm the time they want to have lunch with me. Pushy doesn’t come into it.
Realistically, she is not for me. I prefer an old-fashioned paper diary and the telephone.
But I am intrigued by AI’s potential in the home. As well as Amy, I’ve also been trying out a new Bosch “smart fridge” that has in-built cameras. When I am at the supermarket, I can look at my phone to see if I’ve run out of milk, which is very clever. It is meant to help cut down on waste. Though its claim that I can zoom in to see the best-before date on my fromage frais is laughable – the quality of the pictures is like those taken on a KidiZoom camera.
For five times the price, Samsung has a more sophisticated version that incorporates Amazon’s Alexa, a chatbot that can compile shopping lists for you.
“This is just phase one,” says Johnathan Marsh, director of buying electricals at John Lewis, who says the next iteration is likely to be able to scan your food and then make recipe suggestions from what needs eating up.
Marsh says customers are increasingly asking for “smarthome” gadgets, such as Nest, a souped-up thermostat that uses basic artificial intelligence to “learn” your habits so that it can automatically turn down the heating when you leave the house and – more cleverly – turn it on an hour before you come back from work.
But is the risk that the machines take over? Marsh says: “This is not about taking over your life; it reacts to your behaviour and routines. But in a time-poor culture, the way the technology is evolving should free you up to spend higher quality time with your friends and family.”
Or, possibly, with Amy.
‘A robot that could summarise all the emails I get sent in a day would be great’