Mikey Campbell
Slack Technologies founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield on Monday revealed plans to invest in artificial intelligence with an eye on virtual assistant tech for work groups, while calling Apple's solution "nearly useless."
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Butterfield said future iterations of Slack's existing Slackbot "robot" will incorporate natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to help deal with tedious work tasks. The improvements, he said, will result in a system more akin to the advanced AI portrayed by actress Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze's movie "Her" than competing products from Google and Apple.
"Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices - and it's f-ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless," Butterfield said.
Instead of sinking time and money into product R&D, Slack is looking to partner with firms focusing on AI technology. To that end, the company recently hired its first data scientist and plans to invest in the artificial intelligence space.
With a next-gen Slackbot, Slack is looking to create a virtual assistant capable of tapping into a customer's institutional infrastructure, while connecting simultaneously with everyone on a team to automate certain tasks like scheduling meetings. The goal is to remove time consuming, banal tasks from an employee's plate, something Butterfield believes could boost productivity by 20 to 30 percent.
Current iterations of the programmable query/response system are largely rooted in Slack's direct messaging application, but the bot also surfaces searches and other productivity-minded applications. Future versions might be able to scan a Slack team's messages, recognize when an employee is having trouble with a particular task and automatically schedule an appointment with higher ups to keep the project on track, for example.
Slack is just one of many tech companies conducting research into natural language processing and machine learning. Apple's Siri is one of the best known virtual assistants on the market, but competing services from Google, Microsoft and Amazon are finding success with their respective platforms. Facebook is also researching its own personal assistant called MoneyPenny, a natural language and machine learning initiative that studies human interactions across the social network's vast user base.
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135 Comments
Siri could be better. A LOT better.
[quote name="Eriamjh" url="/t/187755/slack-ceo-denigrates-apples-siri-in-announcing-work-on-own-team-serving-virtual-assistant#post_2762447"]Siri could be better. A LOT better. [/quote] ...but does this Slack have a product or are they just blowing smoke?
While I agree with him I also think that he, like us, does not realize what is happening behind the scenes. Apple I suspect is well aware of the huge limitations with public Siri and they are intentional. For one they want what it does do to work, not just pretend it can do everything and suck at it,; for two Apple is improving what is does do steadily; so that for three they will release a much more capable version of Siri based on all the research they are doing on what Siri is dealing with now. We haven't yet had a real Siri 2.0 moment, everything has just been point releases. I also personally think that using song/artist/album names and dictation as the root points of getting better at a)comprehension and b)building context algorithms based on how people speak out sentences is critical for next level assistants. And I would put money on it that Apple is using all our interactions with Siri for this kind of 2.0 R&D I also, finally think that Apple has been putting energy into building out a global back end that can support said system for 100's of millions of users. AND working on custom silicon for local processing abilities and that the development of these two key components plays a part in Apple appearing to drag its feet with regards to a Siri 2.0
This makes so much sense. Most of the people pressing me to use Slack are kind of dickish.
[quote name="Eriamjh" url="/t/187755/slack-ceo-denigrates-apples-siri-in-announcing-work-on-own-team-serving-virtual-assistant#post_2762447"]Siri could be better. A LOT better. [/quote] Siri gets better everytime I use it. We were using it at work today to play music from both popular and obscure groups at random. She found and played everything we could think of to throw her. We were shocked. Siri does things like prompt you to leave early for an appointment if you put a location and traffic gets backed up. All without being too annoying.