Natural Language forthe Internet of Things

Alexandre Lebrun (Wit.AI)alex@wit.ai

@lxbrun

PRESENTERS AT JUNE’S EDITION OF HARDWIRED INCLUDED:

SAM WURZEL@OCTOPART

ALEX LEBRUN @LXBRUN@WITNLSHAI SCHECHTER @SHAISCHECHTER @DELTAPRINTRJAMES SIMINOFF@TEAMDOORBOTJARED SCHIFFMAN @JAREDSCHIFFMAN @PERCHNYC

MATT TURCK @MATTTURCK@FIRSTMARKCAP

#HARDWIREDNYC

2001-2012Cofounder and CEO@VirtuOz (Nuance Communications)“Intelligent” Virtual Agents for Customer Care(AT&T, eBay, H&R Block, Coca Cola…)

2013-…Cofounder and CEO@Wit.AISiri-as-a-Service for developershttps://wit.ai

Teaching Natural Language to Machines

Human fascination with talking machines

Hephaestus, Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes.

The Turing Test (1950)

Computing, Machinery and Intelligence‘I propose to consider the question: “Can machines think?” (…)’

ELIZA (1966)

HAL 9000 (1968)

KITT (1980)

30 years later…what went wrong?

Real world speech in 2014• Cars• Interactive Voice Response (call centers)• Smartphones (Siri / Google Now / Cortana)

10B voice-first devices by 2018

Yet, voice commands are the future

Why is this so difficult (1)• Two categories of users– “Once bitten, twice shy”– Unrealistic expectations

Why is this so difficult (2)• It’s a hard AI problem: noise, accents,

variations, context, common sense, latency

Speechrecognition

Semanticanalysis

Action Responsegeneration

Text tospeech

Analytics &adaptation

Why is this so difficult (3)• Unlike a GUI, a speech interface doesn’t set

expectations about what it can/cannot do

What’s new?• Major breakthroughs in speech recognition– Deep neural networks– More training data

• Smart devices / wearables / home automation– Limited, well defined scope

• API + Community approaches

Word Errror Rate

Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope– What is the set of commands?– Background noise, type of microphone, distance– Cloud vs. embedded processing

Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations– How to convey the message about what your

device can and cannot do?– Might be obvious. If not, we need to educate

users

Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations• Adapt to users, don’t ask users to adapt to you– Don’t spend too much time with specs– Wizard of Oz approach– Analytics and continuous learning

Best practices• Define a reasonable initial scope• Set users’ expectations• Adapt to users, don’t ask users to adapt to you• Let you device/app be proactive

Her

Thanks!

Alexandre Lebrun (Wit.AI)alex@wit.ai

@lxbrun