It seems like technology has been losing one legend after another. From Steve Jobs, who brought us innovative devices, to Dennis Ritchie, Father of C programming language, and recently artificial intelligence pioneer, John McCarthy passed away.

Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest forms of technology right now, not that it’s new but it’s just now that more use cases are available for a wider range of people and services.  The technology has been around for years.  Some have heard about it, some haven’t, and others even had the chance to experience it, but didn’t even know they’d done so.

Artificial intelligence is a computer program that acts like humans.  Developers of AI are trying to mimic human intelligence; making computers more effective by ‘thinking’ like humans.   And the most popular AI today is Siri, the talking app found on the iPhone 4S.  Siri is a talking personal assistant that helps users with their queries like finding the nearest Italian restaurant or show shop, organizing your schedule, sending e-mails or text messages, just by having a conversation with your phone.  But the reason it’s so popular is because it answers you as a human would, and you can use your own natural language to converse with an AI service.

Siri sparks an awareness revolution

Cleversense, the maker of Alfred, a personal robot for iPhones, added another feature for the robot–Group Recommendations.  Group Recommendations works like this: you decided to eat out, perhaps at a Japanese restaurant.  So you ask Alfred to find the one nearest to you, then you invite friends to dine with you.  Next time, you can just type in your friends’ names and Alfred will recommend a place that he thinks all of you will enjoy.  So that eliminates the time spent debating over where to eat.

“Going out generally speaking is a social event (e.g. you normally don’t go out to a restaurant, a nightclub or place to see attractions by yourself). But deciding what are the best places to go that would match everyone’s taste is always a daunting task. Clever Sense’s Group Recommendation technology can compute in real-time recommendations that are suited for everyone by considering everyone’s taste, time of the day, day of the week and places around. You can simply point out which one of your Facebook friends you’re with and the system provides best suited recommendations with human-readable reasoning behind why each recommendation is good one for the group,” says Babak Pahlavan, CEO of Clever Sense.

“This is only possible with our next generation AI-based deep personalization technology that Clever Sense offers and currently is accessible via Alfred (e.g. you can not ask normal search engines to offer you results that are suited for people that you’re with). “

Artificial Solutions, the company that develops a rather humanlike, intelligent, capable virtual assistants for any platform and in any language, announced Teneo Mobile, a platform that lets users create their own personal assistant as a mobile app.  It uses natural language to help you interact with your mobile device to assist you in your tasks or queries.  Teneo Mobile is powered by  Natural Language Interaction (NLI) engine, a technology patented by Artificial Solutions and uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to input the query, the information is then processed by Teneo Interaction Engine.

Teneo Mobile enables device manufacturers, software and OS providers, and application developers to quickly implement their own mobile virtual assistant.  It offers an innovative and effective way to communicate with their customers, providing 24/7 service in an automated yet approachable way.  A developer toolkit is also available for specialist mobile app developers so they can build sophisticated NLI functionality into their own mobile apps.

As for users, Teneo Mobile offers a new way to communicate with companies in an intuitive and friendly manner.  It is a native app designed to offer a superior user experience and much deeper integration into device features than a simple web app would.  It can call telephone numbers or locate an office on Google maps, as well as recognizing standard mobile features such as “Contacts” or “Calendar,” including idiomatic instructions like “next Tuesday” or “where’s my nearest…”

This fascination with AI begs the question: why are we so into making computers more human-like?  Are there not enough humans in the world that we have to make technology as like human beings?  There’s this annual contest, the Loebner Prize, which aims to find the most human-like technology in terms of brain function.  A panel of judges asks a series of questions to unknown test subjects.  The judges wouldn’t know if who they’re asking are computers or humans.  The winner of the contest is the one who was able to make a computer ‘think’ like a human.

Most computers aren’t able to understand simple questions, but some can be witty like Siri, Teneo Mobile, Alfred and other various Android apps.  But the question remains, why the need to make this?  For one, it makes life easier, as they eliminate or lessen some of our most daunting tasks.  But for me, AI is still only as intelligent as the person who made it, because everything it ‘knows’ is what it’s ‘learned’ from humans.