When we think of personal assistants today, we think of call centers and home automation – “Hey Alexa – turn on the lights”, “I see that your phone number is 202-555-1212 – please press or say ‘1’ if you are calling from the number on your account”. This is not a conversation, this is a set of discrete commands that you could replicate with a button or a web service.
More advanced call centers may have a level of AI which will ask “Please describe your issue so ‘I’ can route your call to the appropriate team”. In this case the system looks for patterns or keywords – kinda like a web based search engine to increase the likelihood that they can route you to the right team. We are inching closer to a time where these systems will get the routing right every time.
But what if you could have an actual dialog? The system needs to not only understand the domain that you in, “trouble shooting your home router” or “booking a vacation in the middle of a series of business trips”. The current domain specific machine learning can get us closer to conversations, but they have issues when the conversation drifts outside of the domain of knowledge that it is trained in. These domains are the context where the assistant is relevant.
Having a conversation without context is just a simple set of stateless commands. The Internet was built on this technology, but as businesses have extended the capabilities of the Internet, we’ve had to maintain state. State allows for context, and this is were conversations must head to realize the power of assistants.
State also allows for domain shifts. If I understand that we are talking about a piece of manufacturing equipment, and suddenly you ask me about the technical skills of an employee, I need to keep track of the domain of prior parts of the conversation and shift to the new domain of employee skills. Understanding this shift, potentially even running separate conversational threads in parallel to see the relevance of each thread to the current part of the conversation, may allow us to increase seamlessness of the conversational shifts.
Seamlessly crossing domains across a conversation will allow businesses to take advantage of voice, and help us realize higher value of this new interface.