Alibaba Already Has a Voice Assistant Way Better Than Google's (technologyreview.com)

Like Google's Duplex, Chinese internet giant Alibaba has its own humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. But unlike Google, which has rolled out the feature to select audience, Alibaba's offering already has a wider reach. And it's smart, too. From a report: On December 2 at the 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, one of the largest annual gatherings for AI research, Alibaba demoed the AI customer service agent for its logistics company Cainiao. Jin Rong, the dean of Alibaba's Machine Intelligence and Technology Lab, said the agent is already servicing millions of customer requests a day. The pre-recorded demo call involved the agent asking a customer where he wanted his package delivered. In the back-and-forth exchange, the agent successfully navigated several conversational elements that demonstrated the breadth of its natural-language capabilities.

Take this exchange at the beginning of the call, translated from Mandarin: Agent: Hello, I am Cainiao's voice assistant. I am --
Customer: Hello.
A: Yes, hi, you have package scheduled for morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Is it convenient for you to receive?
C: Who are you?
A: I am Cainiao's voice assistant. I'd like to confirm your morning delivery to 588 Culture West Road. Does that work for you?
C: I'm not home in the morning.
A: Then do you have another address that you'd like to use?

Within 30 seconds, the agent has smoothly handled three common, and tricky, conversational ingredients: interruption, nonlinear conversation, and implicit intent. Interruption is self-explanatory: the agent can respond to the customer's interruption and continue relaying relevant information without starting over or skipping a beat.

Comments

Re:Oranges to apples?

[Tablizer]

From the article: "That Alibaba's voice assistant can do so suggests it's more sophisticated than Google Duplex, judging from similar sample calls demoed by Google. It's worth noting, however, that Alibaba's demo call is designed for onstage presentation; the experience could differ in reality. Currently, the agent is used only to coordinate package deliveries, but Jin said it could be expanded to handle other topics. He wouldn't fully reveal how the assistant was trained..."

Knowing the region

[ArchieBunker]

It's probably more mechanical turk than AI bot.

Re: I somehow feel good about this...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Here's some of what I've learned over the years. I've been traveling to China for 20 years, lived in Shanghai from 2005 to 2011, and married a Chinese lady. I still spend about 3-4 months a year, at 2-4 weeks at a time, working with several Chinese suppliers and visiting friends and acquaintances.

China, as a culture, does not have the same drive for innovation. Due to 40+ years of heavy, Government/Communist control (top-down), and the same ethos in most businesses (the boss is ALWAYS right, and you cannot challenge him unless you want to clean out your desk and move on), innovation really isn't rewarded, nor even encouraged.

Innovation is looking at the world, and thinking "there's a better way". That is simply not what the ruling generation (50+), nor their kids, understand. Now THEIR kids (currently in grade school) will "get it", and change. The attitude is already starting to swing with the "gen X" age group, but out of deference to their parents and grandparents they maintain the old cultural norm against challenging your superiors.

Additionally, the culture doesn't really do development well. There's a herd mentality, where there is often a good idea of where you are, where you want to be - and not a clue how to map out between the two. Most development happens the way most things in China happen - lots of people working on the problem and one of them gets lucky. There's very little planning and process down at the level needed for real development, or for any research/innovation.

China, right now, really doesn't innovate. Even innovative companies start with someone else's direction, and typically require lots of intervention to complete their "innovation". There are a ton of really smart people over there, but culturally they are held back from actual innovation. Innovation happens with smart people in a room saying "we can do it better, and I can do better than you". China doesn't do that very well, at all, in a business situation. Doing better than your boss results in you losing your job - and thus it's implicitly discouraged to try to innovate.

Go live in the culture over there for several months - you'll get it. New ideas aren't pursued, disagreements about direction/solutions is actively discouraged, not just doing as you're told risks losing your job.