Google: Our Assistant Will Trigger the Next Era of AI (Backchannel)

From a Steven Levy Assistant assessment

"That process, unrolling over the next two years, is The Transition. When millions of people begin conversing with Google, through the Assistant, the seas of difficulty suddenly part. (With Google Home, conversing is the only way you will get any use out of it — there’s no keyboard.) “You can start doing machine learning on that,” Pereira says. “You can move much faster; you can accelerate the process of getting deeper and broader in understanding. This 2016-to-2017 Transition is going to move us from systems that are explicitly taught to ones that implicitly learn.” Think of it as a mini-Singularity.
The data flowing in during this two-year transition won’t stop, of course. (I should clarify here that Pereira and the other Googlers talking about this transition are referring to the collection of data in the aggregate, not in accumulating dossiers on the conversational preferences, peregrinations, and peccadilloes of individual users.) Pereira sees it leading to a better version of the Assistant, which in turn will lead to more usage, more conversation, more data — and more improvement. Perhaps a decade from now, this accelerating cycle may lead to a bot that really knows what we talk about when we talk about…anything."

Google: Our Assistant Will Trigger the Next Era of AI