Last updated on November 1st, 2016 at 05:11 pm
I had the pleasure of meeting Amy Ingram quite by accident. She was copied on an emailed meeting request, and followed up quickly and courteously. I asked the company I was dealing with when they decided to hire a new assistant. Honestly, I felt a little foolish when I learned that Amy was AI. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Not that I felt foolish, but that it was done so well I had no idea.
Amy is the artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistant created by x.ai. She makes executive’s lives easier by scheduling meetings.
For her to do so, x.ai spends massive amounts of time and energy trying to figure out how to decipher sentences with near 100% accuracy. The fact that humans are notoriously imperfect communicators means that the entire product rests on x.ai’s ability to excel at NLP (Natural Language Processing).
Think about the quick notes busy people send to colleagues, clients and friends when trying to meet up. Now imagine the technical complexity of teaching an AI to understand those notes.
This is how easy it is to bring Amy into a conversation:
Do you enjoy setting up meetings? Personally, I don’t. It takes an average of eight emails and seventeen minutes to schedule a single meeting. Each of those meeting conversations contains many pieces of relevant information, with an intricate set of dependencies specific to that particular conversation. The vast scale and heterogeneous structure of all of that data makes it impossible to write enough rules to encapsulate, “What does an email about a meeting mean?”
Have a look at a year in the life of Amy to learn more.
For those who prefer a male personal assistant, there’s also her brother Andrew!
