Artificial Intelligence: Semantic Machines Better Than Siri? | BostInno

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Newsletters Membership CareersEvents Studio This Boston Startup Has an "Elite Team" to Build The Next Siri Dylan Martin - Staff Writer, Tech 01/08/16 @2:50pm inTech3.3K

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A use case example of Semantic Machines" conversational AI.The next big thing in artificial intelligence could be right in Boston"s backyard, and it might just be better thanApple"s Siri and Google Now. Actually, if things go as planned, it"ll blow Siri and the like out of the water."We are peers to companies like Google and Facebook in respect to our work in this area."

Semantic Machines, a Newton-based startup with half of its team in Berkeley, Calif., may not have much to show for its conversational AI platform yet besides a few use case examples postedto its website. But what makes the startup seem so promising is its 23-member team, which includes Larry Gillick,Apple"s former chief speech scientist for Siri, along with people who worked on Google Now. What"s also impressive is that 15 of theteam members have research portfolios that they"ve listed on Semantic"s website, ranging in topics from semantic parsing to "pronunciation guessers in speech recognition.""We are peers to companies like Google and Facebook in respect to our work in this area.Within this field of conversational AI, we have anunbelievablyelite team," Dan Roth, the startup"s CEO and co-founder, told BostInno. "It』s one of the things that makes the ambition we"re going after realistic."

Dan Roth, CEO and co-founder of Semantic Machines.Semantic Machines is building a conversational AI platform, but not in a way that would manifest like Siri and Google Now; it"s not going to be the next personal virtual assistant that you download for your phone. Instead, the startup, which recently raised a $12.3 million Series B round led byBain Capital Venturesand General Catalyst Partners, is building technology that is meant to be used by other companies, like a travel booking site or e-commerce site, allowing you to hold a fluent conversation with an AI to book a flight with a certain set of preferences or buy a TV with certain features.While Roth has built a substantial team of engineers and scientists, Roth himself has quite the pedigree. His own background is in speech recognition and speech synthesis, and in 1995 he co-founded Voice Signal Technologies, a Boston-area startup he ended up selling for $300 million to Burlington-based Nuance Communications. After that, he founded and led Shaser BioScience, which he later sold for $100 million.What will ultimately set Semantic Machines" platform apart from Siri and Google Now, Roth said, is the level of sophistication. While the latter two use natural language processing to recognize different ways people give commands, the startup"s conversational AI will go way beyond that with the ability to recognize semantics and context. What"s more, the platform will be "language independent," meaning it will support multiple languages."If you give Siri a command (and then) if you say something new, it forgets the previous command."

"If you think about it, in order to understand a conversation, you have to maintain memory and context of the things that have occurred already, because the current statement relates to all the previous statements," Roth said. "If you give Siri a command [and then] if you say something new, it forgets the previous command. Maintaining the semantics and context over a long period of time is a tremendously complex thing."To help illustrate the complex kind of conversations Semantic Machines plans to enable, the startup has listed a number of use case examples on its website, ranging in category from e-commerce and travel planning to calendar and search.One of my favorite examples is the concierge use case, which shows someone having a text conversation with a digital assistant about booking a table at a certain restaurant. After asking the assistant to get the person a table for "tomorrow at 7," the assistant asks, "how many?" When the person says "four of us," the assistant responds, saying there"s nothing available at 7 but there is an opening at 10. The person replies ," Ugh, thats [sic] sort of late. What about Oishi?"And just like that, the assistant understands the context of that statement and says the restaurant has an opening at 9:30. After having the assistant email the person"s friends about the booking and some time passes, the person decides he"s O.K. with first restaurant option: "You know what, just take the OYa one at 10 PM." The assistant then responds, "Ok, OYa is booked at 10 PM for 4 people and I cancelled the reservation at Oishi."

One of Semantic Machines" use case examples.To have such an elaborate conversation, Roth said the conversational AI platform requires many components, including semantic analysis, syntactic analysis, deep machine learning, along with speech recognition and speech synthesis if you want to include voice. Roth said recent advancements in deep learning and the explosion of data availability, along with robust cloud services like Amazon Web Services, has enabled Semantic Machines to pursue such a complex undertaking.What"s also powering the conversations are actual humans. Roth said Semantic Machines has hired a team of what they call "agents" to interact with other people through the startup"s platform, so that the platform can be trained.Roth said he doesn"t know of any other companies that are working on conversational AI quite like Semantic Machines is. One of the closest comparisons is Facebook"s M,a virtual assistant powered by real people and assisted by AI that will eventually become available.Otherwise, Roth said, most of the apps under development are more rudimentary bots that won"t have the ability to hold long conversations like Semantic Machines" platform can. However, he said, he"s guessing that Google and Apple are working on their own conversational AI, given their past work and the size of their research teams.It may be a little while until Semantic Machines" conversational AI platform makes its commercial debut through a business partner. Roth said that won"t likely happen until the second half of 2017.Even if it"s a way out before people get a true sense of how powerful Semantic Machines" platform can be, Roth said he believes this is the future of how people will search the Internet, buy things, plan for events and so much more."Anyone who has a large number of customers, they are absolutely going to need conversational interfaces or else they』ll be left behind," Roth said, adding that the idea of apps only having a graphical user interface in five years "is unthinkable.""It』s going to affect absolutely everything," he said.Read More:General Catalyst Partners,Artificial Intelligence,Heating Up,Semantic Machines,Dan Roth,Bain Capital VenturesFrom Our PartnersRelated Articles

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