Artificial Intelligence personal assistant – will it topple the traditional search engine?

    Over the past decade, Google has been dominating the online search domain. With the continual efforts to optimize its website and to improve its algorithm architectures, Google was able to provide users with customized results taken into account of their locations and personal traits. Nevertheless, despite its improvement through the past years, Google still relies heavily on popularity algorithms that often incapacitate differentiation on an individual level. 

    In order to provide consumers with a more comprehensive and dynamic search experience, a slew of companies is developing personalized digital assistants that referenced users’ profile and behavior to deliver more relevant information. Facebook has been testing an Artificial Intelligence-powered personal assistant called M that could link between user’s intent and the transaction where the intent would be fulfilled. Having logged in Messenger, users would be able to type in the message box with specific questions such as “What kinds of A-line dresses available in local stores will be most suitable for the upcoming graduation party?”. The platform would leverage its data on users’ demographics and psychographics, as well as its social network to bring forth the answer that would most likely to appeal to the user. 

    Baidu also unveiled the digital assistant Duer on the 8^th of September that would integrate into the Baidu search app for Android. According to the spokesperson at Baidu, Duer would be able to handle tasks such as food delivery and car rentals via voice commands. It would also provide information on questions such as “which restaurant near me has the best Tuna Roll” by combing through rating websites with users’ location and past preferences in mind. Duer also allows users to control domestic home appliances via smartphone, and to connect with users’ healthcare service providers to provide direct wellness advice based on their heart rates measured by the application. Google has also been developing a similar platform – Google Now that has been implemented as an aspect of the Google Search application. By recognizing users’ repeated actions on the device, Google Now is able to assemble more detailed search and provide information in a clean and intuitive manner.

    These digital assistants equipped with the ability to perform human-like reasoning and problem-solving, would provide better analysis of digital content and thereby substituting Google’s role of being the bridge between users and the solutions. Besides individual users, retailers could also utilize the technology by offering virtual sales assistant that would recommend on products and services based on customer information extracted from the CRM system.

Article Link:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/07/facebooks-messenger-and-the-challenge-to-googles-search-dominance/