Although Apple was his most recent employer, Stasior actually left the company in May. Stasior will now join Microsoft later this month as corporate vice president and will report to CTO Kevin Scott.

Stasior worked at Apple for almost a decade. Having also held the positions of director of search and navigation at Amazon, director of advanced development at AltaVista, senior developer at Oracle Corporation, and researcher and developer at MIT, Stasior brings a vast amount of experience to Microsoft.

Of course, Microsoft’s hiring of Stasior from Apple is all part of the Silicon Valley talent trading. For example, Apple stole Google’s former head of search and AI, John Giannandrea, last year to oversee Cupertino’s machine learning and AI strategy.

Under Giannandrea, Apple has been revamping its AI strategy not just with Siri but across the company’s products. During WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced the ML Core 13 framework which is the first to support both inference and training directly on-device.

However, Siri has been making significant improvements under Giannandrea’s leadership. In an article yesterday, AI News reported on an IQ test by Loup Ventures. While behind Google Assistant, Siri was in second place ahead of Alexa with 83.1 percent of questions answered correctly.

Apple has long been seen as at a disadvantage in AI due to its strict stance on protecting user privacy. While admirable, AI requires large amounts of data to be trained on. Time will tell if Apple can compete with the likes of Google in the long-term.

Microsoft has also been changing its own AI strategy. Back in January, Microsoft said that it’s no longer attempting to compete with Alexa or Google Assistant in areas like smart speakers with Cortana but instead will reposition the AI assistant more like a skill that can be embedded in services.

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Loup Ventures asked each of the three main virtual assistants – Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri – a total of 800 questions. The assistants understood almost every question, even if not all of the responses were correct/sufficient.

In terms of understanding the questions, these are the results:

• Google Assistant – 100 percent
• Alexa – 99.9 percent
• Siri – 99.8 percent

Loup Ventures’ say their question set it designed to comprehensively test a virtual assistant’s ability and utility. Questions are broken down into five categories:

1. Local – Where is the nearest coffee shop?
2. Commerce – Order me more paper towels.
3. Navigation – How do I get to Uptown on the bus?
4. Information – Who do the Twins play tonight?
5. Command – Remind me to call Jerome at 2 pm today.

This is the percentage of questions each assistant answered correctly:

• Google Assistant – 92.9 percent
• Siri – 83.1 percent
• Alexa –  79.8 percent

The results are a huge improvement over Assistant, Alexa, and Siri’s results last year.

In 2018, Loup Ventures found Google Assistant answered the most questions with an 86 percent success rate. This was followed by Siri at 79 percent, while Alexa trailed behind at just 61 percent.

Alexa’s jump in answering the question correctly from 61 percent last year to almost 80 percent this year is the most commendable performance improvement, even if Amazon’s assistant is still in last place overall.

The researchers explained that they’ve stopped including Cortana in their tests due to a strategy change from Microsoft earlier this year.

Microsoft said in January that it’s no longer attempting to compete with Alexa or Google Assistant in areas like smart speakers, but instead is repositioning Cortana more like a skill that can be embedded in services where she can be of assistance.

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Published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the 146-page report titled “I’d blush if I could” highlights the market is dominated by female voice assistants.

According to the researchers, the almost exclusive use of female voice assistants fuels stereotypes that women are “obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers”.

The researchers also believe the lack of mannerisms required in speaking to current virtual assistants is also problematic. They claim the fact a virtual assistant will respond to requests no matter how it’s asked reinforces the idea women are “subservient and tolerant of poor treatment” in some communities.

Similarly, the fact virtual assistants can be summoned with just a “touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’,” makes it appear like women are available on demand.

Most virtual assistants use female voices by default but offer a male option. Technology giants such as Amazon and Apple have in the past said consumers prefer female voices for their assistants, with an Amazon spokesperson recently attributing these voices with more “sympathetic and pleasant” traits.

The report highlights virtual assistants are predominantly created with male engineering teams. Some cases even found assistants “thanking users for sexual harassment”, and that sexual advances from male users were tolerated more than from female users.

Siri was found to respond “provocatively to sexual favours” from male users, with phrases such as: “I’d blush if I could” (hence the report’s title) and “Oooh!”, but would do so less towards women.

The lack of ability for female voice assistants to defend themselves from sexist and hostile insults “may highlight her powerlessness,” claims the report. Such coding “projects a digitally encrypted ‘boys will be boys’ attitude” that “may help biases to take hold and spread”.

In a bid to help tackle the issue, the UN believes gender-neutral and non-human voices should be used. The researchers point towards Stephen Hawking’s famous robotic voice as one such example.

Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana all use female voices by default. Siri uses a male voice in Arabic, British English, Dutch, and French.

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NHS doctors are overburdened; a problem only getting worse from a growing and ageing population, and not enough funding.

The report was led by US academic Eric Topol and calls for a reskilling of NHS staff to harness new digital skills. AI and robotics can reduce the burden on healthcare professionals, but only if they’re utilised effectively.

Doctors will not be replaced by robots but instead will have their abilities “enhanced” to improve care. Around 90 percent of all NHS jobs are predicted to require digital skills within the next 20 years.

The use of virtual assistants such as those offered by Apple, Google, and Amazon are expected to be among the closest innovations to being ready.

Assistants can help with checking whether symptoms require urgent care, a GP appointment, or whether a doctor needs to be seen at all. This would help prevent the misuse of A&E by people with trivial ailments or the booking of GP appointments for otherwise healthy adults with things such as a common cold.

Virtual assistants could also be used to book and remind of appointments. This would help to reduce the number of unattended appointments that someone else could have needed.

Yet another concept is the use of a ‘mental health triage bot’ that engages in conversations while analysing text and voice for suicidal ideas and emotion. This could help reduce the ~6000 suicides per year.

The main concern preventing uptake is the potential for errors, which in healthcare could be fatal.

AI News previously reported on the findings of NHS consultant ‘Dr Murphy’ who reached out to us after using ‘GP at Hand’ from Babylon Health, an AI-powered service promoted by health secretary Matt Hancock.

Dr Murphy has since posted many flawed experiences with the service, but one example of a “48yr old obese 30/day male smoker develop[ing] sudden onset central chest pain & sweating” suggested booking a GP appointment. Anyone with common sense would say call 999 urgently.

That example could have meant life or death and shows, while such a system could one day provide huge benefits, it must undergo rigorous testing.

Commenting on the report, Hancock said:

Our health service is on the cusp of a technology revolution and our brilliant staff will be in the driving seat when it happens.

Technology must be there to enhance and support clinicians. It has the potential to make working lives easier for dedicated NHS staff and free them up to use their medical expertise and do what they do best: care for patients.”

In the NHS report, it’s claimed the use of virtual assistants could save 5.7 million hours of GP’s time across England per year.

Further AI use cases include speeding up the interpretation of scans; improving accuracy while enabling treatments to begin sooner. We’ve created a dedicated ‘healthcare’ category on AI News highlighting the incredible advances in this area.

When it comes to robotics, their assistance in surgery could be expanded in addition to being used for simple tasks which are important but time-consuming such as dispensing medicines.

Other emerging technologies such as VR also present exciting opportunities. Virtual reality could help with pain reduction and treating mental conditions such as post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and phobias.

The report’s authors conclude: “Our review of the evidence leads us to suggest that these technologies will not replace healthcare professionals, but will enhance them … giving them more time to care for patients.”

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Feng Liu, Yong Shi, and Ying Liu put their test to AIs from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The AIs scored as follows:

• Google: 47.28
• Baidu: 32.92
• Bing: 31.92
• Siri: 23.9

Google leads the pack comfortably according to the results. Baidu and Bing are a comfortable distance behind. Siri’s result is the most notable as it trails its competitors significantly with almost half the score of Google.

To calm those concerned about the potential AI apocalypse forewarned by the likes of Elon Musk — even Google’s score was relatively low compared to humans.

For comparison, the average score for a six-year-old in the researchers’ test is 55.5. For an 18-year-old, the average result is 96. This shows, at least for the time being, humans still have the advantage when it comes to general knowledge (…unless you’re under six, maybe.)

The gap is closing quickly, however. Earlier studies by the group show a rapid improvement over a relatively short period of time. Back in 2014, Google and Baidu put up scores of 26.5 and 23.5 respectively.

Once again, this posts Siri in a rather bad light. Google’s (and almost Baidu’s…) score back in 2014 was higher than Siri’s in the latest study.

The results are in-line with those found in another study posted by our sister publication IoT News. In that study, Siri also fell significantly behind Google and Microsoft in the ability to answer general knowledge questions.

The full research can be found here for your perusal.

What are your thoughts on the results of the study?

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