Nick Triantos (Managing director, Ventures at SRI) presentation at Assist Workshop 2016

1. POWERTHROUGH SIMPLICITY:
NEW USER INTERFACES BUILT ATOPVIRTUAL ASSISTANTS
NickTriantos, Managing Director, SRIVentures

3. About SRI
Wearable Robotics
The Internet
Computer Mouse
Cybersecurity
Siri
Autonomous Robotics Space & Comms
Diagnostic Ultrasound

4. OUR PAST

5. OVERVIEW OF CURRENT
VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS

6. GOOGLE ASSISTANT
• Google Home & Google Allo
• Context-aware responses
• Leverages the other data Google knows about you
• Only available through Google apps so far "This is not a thing that's going to
figure itself out in 2016. It's going to
be a long journey."
– Mario Queiroz,VP Product, Google

7. AMAZON ECHO
• Fun cloud-based platform
• Excellent hardware for far-field voice recognition
• Excellent ASR and getting even better
• Extensible, and now appearing in non-Amazon products
• Very limited capability to have a conversation
• Requires connectivity

8. APPLE SIRI
• Siri coming to MacOS? Already on Apple
Watch,AppleTV, iPad
• Rumors of Echo-like device coming
• Breadth has grown, but capabilities seem stalled
[[Re-confirm after WWDC]]

9. FACEBOOK "M"
• 100% human-powered today
• Goal to be 100% machine-driven in 5 years
• Access to huge database of your interests and those of your friends
• Likely highly driven by selling ads

10. AND PLENTY OF OTHERS,TOO

11. CHALLENGES OF BEINGTOO
GENERAL PURPOSE

13. –The Simpsons, 1994

15. DEEP KNOWLEDGE
&
THE RISE OFVIRTUAL SPECIALISTS

16. SRIVIRTUAL ASSISTANT ("VPA")
• Deeply conversational
• Well-suited as "Virtual Specialist"
• Custom speech recognition models
• Highly customizable ontologies
• Embedded in numerous platforms
• Can work without the cloud

17. MORE NATURAL
COMMUNICATION
FLOW
Transfer €200 to checking.
From which account?
How does my savings look?
Your savings balance is €2.200.
Should I continue the transfer?
Will there be any fees?
No, your savings account has
unlimited free transfers
OK, go ahead and transfer
the money.
Your €200 transfer from savings
to checking is complete.

18. DOMAIN SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Transfer
From To
Account
Savings Checking
Restrictions
Restrictions
Balance
Warnings
! Fee warning
Balance warning!

19. EXTENSIBILITY

20. ONTOLOGY AUTHORING
• Use W3C standards for data from semantic web
• Customizable tools for authoring
• Leverage myriad web APIs for data
• Move much of experience authoring from
engineers to interaction designers

21. PERSONALIZINGTHE EXPERIENCE

22. SOCIAL INFLUENCES
• Opaque adaptable recommendations
• Leverage huge pool of data in social
networks
• Likely to dramatically improve over time
• Allow for high-value advertising if done well

23. EMOTION DETECTION

24. Virtual Assistant Platform
PERSONALIZATION HUB
Present a better experience, personalized
to the user, based on:
• Who the user is
• What the user usually likes
• What state the user is in
• Where and when the interaction with
the user occurs
Context
aware
Emotion
detection
Preference
learning
Biometric
ID
Application

25. USER INTERFACE IS STILL USEFUL

26. Bringing it all together

27. NickTriantos
nick.triantos@sri.com
@triantos
Thank you