【NetEase Smart News, August 13th message】The arrival of the artificial intelligence era has sparked widespread attention from all walks of life, but most of the conversations surrounding this topic are not directly related to its actual areas of application. In the real world, the emergence of artificial intelligence is not to replace general human intelligence, but about automating specific tasks and solving specific problems that require technology, rather than simply executing simple pre-programming like if-then-else.
Mobile check deposits and adaptive cruise control are just two examples of problems that artificial intelligence has solved, and both services have been taken for granted for some time now. In fact, as artificial intelligence applications become more widespread, people no longer consider them "artificial intelligence," but reserve the term for the infinite possibilities of the future. But the reality is that we already have many powerful tools that can help us save time and money.
When we look at the potential of AI through a more realistic lens and start thinking about its applications, many will turn their attention to the home, where countless daily tasks are tailor-made for automation. While voice and smart home assistants have already alleviated the burden of household management, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
One day, our home assistants will be able to take the initiative to help us handle many of the daily affairs related to the house. Imagine your home assistant monitoring that your air conditioning system is about to fail and arranging for a technician to come over. Knowing that the owner is not at home, it will open the door for the technician when he arrives, lock the door after the repair is completed, and then share a summary report with you after you get home from work, along with relevant video clips.
But while we eagerly await this simplified future to become a reality, we must also realize that we will still be part of it. In fact, talking about the real added value of AI in the home, it needs to enable people to play a more important role, more important than their own expectations. Why? There are three main reasons for this.
Clarify family status and understand the master's intention
A true smart home would understand the intent of humans, but first and foremost it must be able to understand the state of the home. While data from sensors and devices combined with AI algorithms can enable you to develop a reasonably accurate model of the state of the home (e.g., everyone is sleeping, or adults are working, but the kids just got home from school), occasional clarifications in ambiguous cases can help improve the speed and accuracy of the machine learning process.
However, getting your smart home to fully understand your needs is still difficult. Even with a *** personal home assistant, your home needs to start with instructions from you to ensure it gives the right recommendations.***In the end, when your home assistant can learn from this feedback loop and deeply understand your different needs in different situations, it can make the transition from simply making recommendations to automatically taking actions and providing confirmation.
To achieve seamless automation
While we often like to imagine having a smart home assistant in the background to help us stay organized, research into smart homes has shown a different result: people actually want to be part of this loop. We had initially thought that our users would have a strong preference for “invisible automation,” meaning that they would want the home automation system to operate without disturbing them, but it turns out that this is not the case.
Instead, it turns out that homeowners want immediate feedback and notifications about what’s happening in their homes, even if they’re convinced those things are what they want. They’re happy to have their homes automatically lock the doors after everyone has left, for example, as long as the system tells them what it’s doing and why.
This creates a stark contrast with mobile apps, where users are hyper-sensitive to the constant stream of notifications. What differentiates smart home from mobile apps is that people are more tolerant of messages from smart home devices, as each message is personal, relevant and valuable.
Let AI steer the ship
In the ideal state of "autonomous driving", your house can notify you of the actions it is taking at any time. And this state is not easy to achieve, whether for the house or the owner, because this process requires humans to give up control, but most people can't clearly understand what artificial intelligence can do, why it does it, and when it will do it, so people won't easily trust it. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to gradually establish understanding and trust between humans and artificial intelligence, which means that people will gradually let go and let artificial intelligence take care of various affairs at home.
Moreover, human life is unpredictable, so no AI can predict the occurrence of special cases. This is where we humans come in. We need to take back control in these moments, and AI needs to facilitate the transition in a seamless and natural way. Even when control is not required, people still need to confirm to the AI that this is an option that is feasible—beyond functional requirements, this is also an emotional need.
To get our homes to understand what we want to do and help us do it, we've been waiting a long time. But as we get closer to this ideal, we should remember that AI will have a learning curve not just in machine learning algorithms, but also as it tries to understand home states and human intent, and as people gradually realize their important role in shaping the real intelligent home experience. (Selected from: venturebeat; Compiled by: NetEase Foreign Language Intelligent Compilation Platform; Reviewed by: Jiang Qihang) This article is selected from NetEase Technology.