How has technology benefitted the generation of this century at its best by far? The most obvious and common answer expected is, “Each and everything is just a click away”. Well yes, of course. Today all we need is to feed some search engines with a few text queries and answers are just a click away. But what if life gets a bit more blissful and enchanting and we are told that now we don’t even have to spoon feed the machine with text queries and instead we can just converse and achieve what we want. On 5th February, 2013, Expect Labs, a San Francisco startup, announcing its partnership with Factual Inc. revealed about its wizardry invention named Anticipatory Computing Engine or ACE. ACE is the first ever technique to make the digital assistants socially adaptive and understand real time human conversations to produce results precisely.
Since its foundation in 2011, Expect Labs has played its role as a trail blazer in making digital assistants intellectually sound and intuitive each day. Expect Labs believe that since many components such as media files, camera, games etc. has been efficiently integrated with mobile phones, searching for information should not be restricted only to the hard signals like the “text messages” but should be expanded by relying on “soft” signals such as audio, video and location information. Indeed no mountain peak can be climbed without bruises; the task of building up a digital assistant with capabilities to respond to soft signals is not a merry-go-round ride as well. And neither does Expect Labs claim anything otherwise. After a research of over two years, Expect Labs came to a conclusion that out of millions of unstructured data resulting from voice recognition technique, to fetch for one perfect solution, what a machine requires is PRACTICE. Over a period of time if this digital assistant is exposed to real time conversation, then not only will it be able to understand the intent but also would bring out solutions or predictions relevant to the future.
For initial trial, Expect Labs devised MindMeld, which is the first ever mobile app for communication that understands conversation in real-time. This would not only precisely understand intention of the conversation made, but will observe the conversation history from time to time and produce results in future for relevant searches. That is one might also get the result before one asks for it. With the recorded history of conversation this digital assistant will read the mind of the communicating person, identify the key concepts and usual subjects of discussion to offer it in future in a passive manner in addition to giving active results for the current queries through voice recognition techniques. Expect Labs have always profited from its partnerships. On one hand where teaming up with Nuance has helped them equip the ACE platform with brilliant voice recognition technology, partnership with Factual Inc. will give the same platform an understanding regarding local business, point of interest and venues.
In the modern age, with diminishing values, perishing friendship and understanding and increasing power of materialistic lust, what a human being actually craves for is someone who can understand their silence. Why not replace even that with TECHNOLOGY. ACE surely is impressive enough to replace an entire genre of technologies grabbing the minds today. Tech Entice hopes that this invention becomes the mother of tomorrow’s necessity.
