Entrepreneur is on the ground at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Check back for highlights from the event as well as insights from thought leaders and innovators.
Amazon’s Alexa, which provides an easy way to play music, turn on a light or order toiletries, is one of the first steps to artificial intelligence that can greatly benefit us in our day-to-day lives. But while Alexa may be a standout in AI, the technology isn’t alone. Just this year, Google’s AlphaGo made history by defeating a master human player at the ancient game of Go, and Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his AI home assistant, Jarvis. However, the world of AI is still very new, with a lot of questions, concerns and unknowns remaining.
To get more insights into the AI field and where it is heading next, we reached out to Alex Capecelatro, founder and CEO of Josh.ai, which created a voice activated home-automation system. He will discuss AI during a panel discussion at CES.
His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
What’s surprised you in the past year in the artificial intelligence field?
In terms of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), we saw a massive adoption of personal assistants in the form of Amazon Echo and Google Home. Microsoft recently announced its hardware component for Cortana, and we expect to see Apple getting into this space as well. None of this technology would be possible without really accurate automatic speech recognition and sophisticated natural language processing. That said, the technology wouldn’t matter if not for the massive adoption we’ve seen.
Personally, I’ve been surprised at how quickly consumers are adopting to this technology, but also surprised at how nascent the products tend to be.
We focus on the smart home, which is a massive opportunity and one that is growing quickly, yet the number of connected devices in an average household is still low and therefore an AI for the home is only as powerful as those devices are distributed.
There’s also very little “learning” in the current marketplace. My company, Josh.ai, and others are working to change this, but the distinction between human-like and conscious is important and we’re nowhere near…