KEYWORDS | By Christopher Mims
The age of intelligent machines has arrived--only they don't
look at all like we expected. Forget what you've seen in movies;
this is no HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it's certainly not
Scarlett Johansson's disembodied voice in "Her." It's more akin to
what happens when insects, or even fungi, do when they "think."
(What, you didn't know that slime molds can solve mazes?)
Artificial intelligence has lately been transformed from an
academic curiosity to something that has measurable impact on our
lives. Google Inc. used it to increase the accuracy of voice
recognition in Android by 25%. The Associated Press is printing
business stories written by it. Facebook Inc. is toying with it as
a way to improve the relevance of the posts it shows you.
What is especially interesting about this point in the history
of AI is that it's no longer just for technology companies.
Startups are beginning to adapt it to problems where, at least to
me, its applicability is genuinely surprising.
Take advertising copywriting. Could the "Mad Men" of Don
Draper's day have predicted that by the beginning of the next
century, they would be replaced by machines? Yet a company called
Persado aims to do just that.
Persado does one thing, and judging by its client list, which
includes Citigroup Inc. and Motorola Mobility, it does it well. It
writes advertising emails and "landing pages" (where you end up if
you click on a link in one of those emails, or an ad).
Here's an example: Persado's engine is being used across all of
the types of emails a top U.S. wireless carrier sends out when it
wants to convince its customers to renew their contracts, upgrade
to a better plan or otherwise spend money.
Traditionally, an advertising copywriter would pen these emails;
perhaps the company would test a few variants on a subset of its
customers, to see which is best.
But Persado's software deconstructs advertisements into five
components, including emotion words, characteristics of the
product, the "call to action" and even the position of text and the
images accompanying it. By recombining them in millions of ways and
then distilling their essential characteristics into eight or more
test emails that are sent to some customers, Persado says it can
effectively determine the best possible come-on.
"A creative person is good but random," says Lawrence Whittle,
head of sales at Persado. "We've taken the randomness out by
building an ontology of language."
The results speak for themselves: In the case of emails intended
to convince mobile subscribers to renew their plans, initial trials
with Persado increased click-through rates by 195%, the company
says.
Here's another example of AI becoming genuinely useful: X.ai is
a startup aimed, like Persado, at doing one thing exceptionally
well. In this case, it's scheduling meetings. X.ai's virtual
assistant, Amy, isn't a website or an app; she's simply a "person"
whom you cc: on emails to anyone with whom you'd like to schedule a
meeting. Her sole "interface" is emails she sends and
receives--just like a real assistant. Thus, you don't have to
bother with back-and-forth emails trying to find a convenient time
and available place for lunch. Amy can correspond fluidly with
anyone, but only on the subject of his or her calendar. This sounds
like a simple problem to crack, but it isn't, because Amy must
communicate with a human being who might not even know she's an AI,
and she must do it flawlessly, says X.ai founder Dennis
Mortensen.
E-mail conversations with Amy are already quite smooth. Mr.
Mortensen used her to schedule our meeting, naturally, and it
worked even though I purposely threw in some ambiguous language
about the times I was available. But that is in part because Amy is
still in the "training" stage, where anything she doesn't
understand gets handed to humans employed by X.ai.
It sounds like cheating, but every artificially intelligent
system needs a body of data on which to "train" initially. For
Persado, that body of data was text messages sent to prepaid
cellphone customers in Europe, urging them to re-up their minutes
or opt into special plans. For Amy, it's a race to get a body of
100,000 email meeting requests. Amusingly, engineers at X.ai
thought about using one of the biggest public database of emails
available, the Enron emails, but there is too much scheming in them
to be a good sample.
Both of these systems, and others like them, work precisely
because their makers have decided to tackle problems that are as
narrowly defined as possible. Amy doesn't have to have a
conversation about the weather--just when and where you'd like to
schedule a meeting. And Persado's system isn't going to come up
with the next "Just Do It" campaign.
This is where some might object that the commercialized vision
for AI isn't intelligent at all. But academics can't even agree on
where the cutoff for "intelligence" is in living things, so the
fact that these first steps toward economically useful artificial
intelligence lie somewhere near the bottom of the spectrum of
things that think shouldn't bother us.
We're also at a time when it seems that advances in the sheer
power of computers will lead to AI that becomes progressively
smarter. So-called deep-learning algorithms allow machines to learn
unsupervised, whereas both Persado and X.ai's systems require
training guided by humans.
Last year Google showed that its own deep-learning systems could
learn to recognize a cat from millions of images scraped from the
Internet, without ever being told what a cat was in the first
place. It's a parlor trick, but it isn't hard to see where this is
going--the enhancement of the effectiveness of knowledge workers.
Mr. Mortensen estimates there are 87 million of them in the world
already, and they schedule 10 billion meetings a year. As more
tools tackling specific portions of their job become available,
their days could be filled with the things that only humans can do,
like creativity.
"I think the next Siri is not Siri; it's 100 companies like ours
mashed into one," says Mr. Mortensen.
Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims or write to him at
christopher.mims@wsj.com.
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