What is a Conversational Interface?
Medium has lots of great articles on Conversation Interface, Natural Language, and Natural Interface
Articles about CUI on Smashing Magazine
Also look on MIT Technology Review
Is Alexa Dangerous? The Atlantic
Conversational UI, Three Basic Types:
- Voice Assistants/Voice only: you talk to. Google has OK Google, Amazon has Echo. Note that both of these use visual cues to indicate states of listening, talking, confusion, etc.
- Chatbots: you type to. Facebook has M, Slack’s Slackbot, Read about other top chatbots
- Intermodal/ Virtual Agents: combination of talking and/or typing that interacts with traditional visual interface. Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana. Combines voice, touch, visuals.
(Image from Design Actions for Smart Assistant)
Early Conversational UI/Natural Language Interface
Eliza 1963
“ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966[1] at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.”
“Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, Eliza simulated conversation by using a “pattern matching” and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events…. ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, but was also regarded as one of the first programs capable of passing the Turing Test.” (Wikipedia)
Fictional Voice Assistants
Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey
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WOPR from Wargames 1983
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Apple Knowledge Navigator 1987
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Her, 2013
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dJTU48_yghs
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CUI Interface Timeline
1964: Eliza
2011: Siri—the first voice-enabled Virtual Assistant
2015: Amazon Echo (Alexa)
2016: Google Home
2018 Google Duplex (Which voice is the AI?) Can read more about Duplex in this article.
2019-20 Amazon Echo Expanding: Echo Show, Echo Auto, Echo Look, Echo Loop—
2020: GPT-3 Technology Review Article on GPT-3 Using the NLP model, computers can produce not only human like dialogue/text but computers can even write code.
2022: ChatGPT-3
2023: Google ChatGPT Rival in May | Coming soon ChatGPT-4. The integration of ChatGPT into Microsoft Word. Plug-ins for Figma.
Future Facing Projects
Neuralink, also Wired article about Neuralink
“The Long Search for a Computer that Speaks to Your Mind”
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Why Now? What tech breakthroughs?
—Processing Power: Cloud Computing (platforms like Amazon Web Services)
—Natural Language Processing (NLP): a machine’s ability to ingest what is said, break the language down, comprehend language meaning, determine appropriate action, and respond back in language the user will understand. NLP uses machine learning in several forms. One of these forms is Neural Networks that are inspired by biological neural networks in the brain.