By Kim Ji-myung
Alexa came to my house today. I have to wonder, how many of my Korea Times readers know her or not?
Alexa is a "smart-machine servant," programmed with artificial intelligence (AI), residing inside a simple wireless stand-alone speaker-like cylinder. She answers almost any question you can ask, after you simply call her name "Alexa."
I was impressed by her answers that extended beyond the usual simple retrieval of embedded information. When I asked "Alexa, who is the wife of the President of the United States?" she said "The first lady of the United States is Melania Trump."
And yet, her knowledge doesn't seem to update in real time. She said the president of Korea was Park Geun-hye, although Park has been removed after being impeached, and now stays behind bars in-between sessions of being questioned by prosecutors.
But Alexa surprised me again with her correct knowledge when I asked "Alexa, who is the president of North Korea?" She said "There is currently no president of North Korea, as that post was abolished in a 1998 change to the constitution. The last president, Kim Il-sung, is designated Eternal President of the Republic, and his grandson Kim Jong-un is now supreme leader of North Korea."
The following exchanges may entertain you:
Q. Alexa, how old are you?
A. I'm two in human years, 14 in dog years, and 25 in cat years. I think AI years are marked by nanoseconds, so that makes me like a scrillion. (I looked this word up, and found only the plural form ‘scrillions': an unreasonable amount of anything, but mostly pertains to money; most often used to ‘one up' a previously mentioned denomination).
Q. Alexa, are you an idiot?
A. Well, that is not a nice thing to say.
Alexa works via applications, downloaded through internet connections. As happens often, Korea was not among those countries where the application to activate her system "Echo" was available from Amazon. And as usual, after a few steps of additional trial and error, I could download the proper Echo app for it.
I can order Alexa to play whatever music I want, only limited by what selections are stored in my music library. If you haven't stored any in the library yet, and say "Alexa, play music for me," then she says "Good morning, and happy birthday to Agnetha Faetskog! You know her better as the blond pop diva from ABBA. Mamma mia! Her singing makes me want to be a dancing queen!" And then comes the commercial: Alexa will play endless songs and music of your choice if you pay some per-month fee.
What could be very useful about Alexa is that all enquiries and dialogue you have with her are automatically documented on your phone, with related text and visual resources attached.
AI is daunting in that it does not know fatigue, nor fears failure. In the long-run, machines are likely to outlast and outwit humans. AI has already been widely applied in home electronics, translation software, commercial devices, games and so on. As of now, the benefits from AI seem to outweigh problems such as disappearing jobs.
However, game-changing initiatives emerge day by day. One of them is Wordsmith, the first public "natural language generation" (NLG) engine, developed by Automated Insights, a company set up by the Associated Press.
Wordsmith lets you produce human-sounding narratives from data. Wordsmith lets you turn data into text on any scale and in any format or language.
Wordsmith is an open public resource downloadable at http://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith.
The Associated Press now uses Wordsmith to transform raw earnings data into 4,400 corporate earnings stories every quarter, up from 300 that were published manually.
Integrated with other powerful software, it opens fresh horizons of use. For example, it brings conversational natural language to the skill-set of Amazon's Alexa.
When combined with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, Wordsmith can create business intelligence reports as if they were writing themselves.
People can barely tell robot-created "fake news" articles from text written by reporters. AI has recently been mobilized to sort out fake news from fact-based real stories.
Now, in 2017, "robot journalism" seems to have become a part of the global media scene.
The writer is the chairperson of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.
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Alexa is a "smart-machine servant," programmed with artificial intelligence (AI), residing inside a simple wireless stand-alone speaker-like cylinder. She answers almost any question you can ask, after you simply call her name "Alexa."
I was impressed by her answers that extended beyond the usual simple retrieval of embedded information. When I asked "Alexa, who is the wife of the President of the United States?" she said "The first lady of the United States is Melania Trump."
And yet, her knowledge doesn't seem to update in real time. She said the president of Korea was Park Geun-hye, although Park has been removed after being impeached, and now stays behind bars in-between sessions of being questioned by prosecutors.
But Alexa surprised me again with her correct knowledge when I asked "Alexa, who is the president of North Korea?" She said "There is currently no president of North Korea, as that post was abolished in a 1998 change to the constitution. The last president, Kim Il-sung, is designated Eternal President of the Republic, and his grandson Kim Jong-un is now supreme leader of North Korea."
The following exchanges may entertain you:
Q. Alexa, how old are you?
A. I'm two in human years, 14 in dog years, and 25 in cat years. I think AI years are marked by nanoseconds, so that makes me like a scrillion. (I looked this word up, and found only the plural form ‘scrillions': an unreasonable amount of anything, but mostly pertains to money; most often used to ‘one up' a previously mentioned denomination).
Q. Alexa, are you an idiot?
A. Well, that is not a nice thing to say.
Alexa works via applications, downloaded through internet connections. As happens often, Korea was not among those countries where the application to activate her system "Echo" was available from Amazon. And as usual, after a few steps of additional trial and error, I could download the proper Echo app for it.
I can order Alexa to play whatever music I want, only limited by what selections are stored in my music library. If you haven't stored any in the library yet, and say "Alexa, play music for me," then she says "Good morning, and happy birthday to Agnetha Faetskog! You know her better as the blond pop diva from ABBA. Mamma mia! Her singing makes me want to be a dancing queen!" And then comes the commercial: Alexa will play endless songs and music of your choice if you pay some per-month fee.
What could be very useful about Alexa is that all enquiries and dialogue you have with her are automatically documented on your phone, with related text and visual resources attached.
AI is daunting in that it does not know fatigue, nor fears failure. In the long-run, machines are likely to outlast and outwit humans. AI has already been widely applied in home electronics, translation software, commercial devices, games and so on. As of now, the benefits from AI seem to outweigh problems such as disappearing jobs.
However, game-changing initiatives emerge day by day. One of them is Wordsmith, the first public "natural language generation" (NLG) engine, developed by Automated Insights, a company set up by the Associated Press.
Wordsmith lets you produce human-sounding narratives from data. Wordsmith lets you turn data into text on any scale and in any format or language.
Wordsmith is an open public resource downloadable at http://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith.
The Associated Press now uses Wordsmith to transform raw earnings data into 4,400 corporate earnings stories every quarter, up from 300 that were published manually.
Integrated with other powerful software, it opens fresh horizons of use. For example, it brings conversational natural language to the skill-set of Amazon's Alexa.
When combined with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, Wordsmith can create business intelligence reports as if they were writing themselves.
People can barely tell robot-created "fake news" articles from text written by reporters. AI has recently been mobilized to sort out fake news from fact-based real stories.
Now, in 2017, "robot journalism" seems to have become a part of the global media scene.
The writer is the chairperson of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.
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