AI Assistants and You

be your personal assistant. That's the best kind of war because we win no matter who wins, right, we get the best out of whichever combatants into the AI personal assistant thunderdome. I'm throwing out a lot of references to sci fi here. I'm gonna cut that out. So we want to talk today. We being me and you you can talk back. I just won't be able to hear you about these personal digital assistants, but not the p

d as of the past. We want to talk about the the series and the Cortanas and the Google Assistance and things of that nature. And I want to specifically look into how are these going to be incorporated into our lives in the future, and what are some of the concerns we have and what differentiates all these products that have been sort of coming into their own over

the past few years. So to start with, you might say, well, you know which of these assistants came first, And arguably you could say Google actually beat everyone to the punch by a couple of months because on June four, two eleven, Google announced at an inside Google Search event that it was going to roll out voice search on Google dot Com. And the project name at Google was uh Majel or Magel, depending upon how you want to pronounce it, but Majel

would be the way her name was actually pronounced. Named after Majel Barrett, who was the wife of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. Majel Barrett actually played the voice of the computer system, particularly on Star Trek the next generation. Whenever you heard the computer speak, that was Majel Barrett's voice. She also played uh Deanna Troy's mother, Luaxanna Troy. Anyway, they named it after her. Internally, uh it actually doesn't have a name name, which kind of

sets it apart from some of the competitors. So the Voice Command project was a tool from Google Labs, so their research and development arm and on March fourteen, this particular feature was rolled into the Google Now product and uh it was part of the Android four point one release that was the jelly Bean release. Now, at that point,

the speech recognition commands had evolved a little bit. It had gone beyond some of the initial old stuff where you could just ask Google to search something for you. This was also a feature that was worked into Google Glass, so if you had a pair of Google Glass, you know that the voice command would always start with the phrase okay, followed by Google I'm not gonna say it together, just in case some of you are listening to your devices or listening with a device nearby and it's on

its home screen. I don't want to activate it for whatever reason, but you can use that phrase that would end up alerting the virtual assistant that you wanted something, and then you would speak whatever it was you wanted. And over time, functionality increase, so it went beyond just searches and into more interactive features like with an Android phone you could set an alarm, or you could set

a reminder or review your calendar and more. As time went on, at this point it is evolved into something a little bit more robust than that. Even you can start to interact with some third party stuff as well. And at Google Io two thousand and sixteen, it became part of Google Assistant. Now Google Assistant is really the

intelligent personal assistant product from Google. The earlier versions you could think of a sort of a rudimentary form or or perhaps a prototype or maybe just like these are features that would eventually be rolled all into one finished product, being Google Assistant. So by that argument, if you say Google Assistant, you know, if you mark the Google I event as its premier, then it's not the oldest. But it dates back to June fourteen, two thousand eleven, when

Google announced this initial search voice search ability. So that same year, in October, on October fourteenth, in fact, Apple introduced Sirie. And I'm sure you all know what Siri is, but just in case you don't, it's billed as an intelligent personal assistant and it was introduced as a feature with the iPhone for S and it's been part of the iPhone iOS ecosystem ever since. And it uses speech recognition to interpret user requests and responds with what is

hopefully inappropriate action. According to series creators, Apple actually scaled back what Siri was supposed to be able to do. They said that they had arranged for Siri to work with about forty to forty five different apps that Apple had, and then the company scaled that back significantly, so the

serie creators essentially sold the product to Apple. Then they went on to create a different intelligent assistant called VIV v I V and VIV is currently unaffiliated with any other big names, but it has received funding from some very wealthy folks in the text sphere, like Mark Zuckerberg,

for example. And VIV is what the creators of vivs say that it's what Siri was supposed to be from the get go, and and essentially they're saying that Siri, you was kind of hampered, hamstrung, if you will, by Apple um And we'll get into more about why that

may be in a little bit. So Sirie actually came second after Google had announced their voice search, keeping in mind that Siri was a different presentation, So you could argue that Siri was really more of the first assistant, and that the Google approach eventually evolved into an assistant. But wasn't really at that same level back in Moving forward in spring two thousand and fourteen, that's when Microsoft got into the game by unveiling Cortana, which is their

intelligent assistant for the Windows Phone platform. And in twenty fifteen, Microsoft included Cortana with Windows ten. So if you have a Windows ten machine, Cortana is part of that, and if you have a microphone you can actually give voice commands to Cortana. You can also interact via text um. Cortana is named after the AI and the Halo franchise and is voiced by the same act Risks who provided the voice of Cortana in the games. So you can ask fun things about Master Chief and she always has

a interesting answer for those. All of these, by the way, tend to have some sort of fun element to them, where the developers clearly thought of ridiculous things you could ask the digital assistance and built in responses that were humorous. For example, the big one that everyone talked about with Siri was where can I hide a body? And Syrie would come back with nearby quarries and caves systems and

things of that nature. Now, in November two thousand fourteen, we get our final big name in this battle, Amazon. That's when Amazon unveiled the Echo, which is that sort of standalone speaker system UH that has the Intelligent Assistant Alexa incorporated into it. And like the other ones I've mentioned so far, Alexa can follow your voice commands and interact with the Internet as well as with other Internet

connected devices. That list of Internet connected devices Alexa can work with is growing day by day, and Amazon is actually trying to build out the capabilities further and as such as hired a team to create a guide on how to develop for Alexa. I'm going to interview one of the developers on that team in a later episode. We actually have that scheduled for later this summer, and we'll talk more about what it's like to develop for this platform and the potential of using such a platform

and in new and creative ways. So we have four really big players in the space. We've got Apple and Google and Microsoft and Amazon already vying to be the big digital assistant provider. Then we have the other names, like we've got the team behind Viv and other apps as well that are in this space that are trying to kind of become the voice that you interact with um so that it can do all the things you needed to do in a s seamless away as possible. So one of the things we need to also look

at is how does this differentiate? How do these different players? How are they different from one another? If they're exactly the same as each other, then it really doesn't matter which one you pick, right, I mean, they're kind of depends just which platform you have available. If you have all iOS devices, then Siri is pretty much gonna be the one you're gonna depend upon the most most likely

at any rate. So Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant are all part of existing platforms like smartphones and computers, So they are incorporated into things that we already have. You know, you probably already have a smartphone or a computer or both, and so it makes sense that you would incorporate your digital assistant into that. You don't have to buy anything else. It's right there, and you can incorporate that into other systems that are connected to a personal network or a

home net work. Then you've got Alexa, which debuted on a standalone device called the Echo, which again is just this sort of intelligent speaker, a smart speaker with a built in microphone. Google Assistant is actually following suit with that with Google Home that was announced at Google Io two.

And Google Home is also a smart speaker with a microphone that's gonna be available sometime later in t and as of the recording of this podcast, I don't have a date or a price on that, so it's hard to say whether or not it will be competitively priced

against the Amazon Echo. It does like it's going to be a particularly powerful version of this personal assistant, And there are also rumors emerging that Apple is also working on Sirie hardware, so it would be another standalone speaker microphone system of some sort, and that Apple's Sirie platform would exist on that. Now, as of the recording of this podcast, we don't have confirmation on that, so there's no timetable associated with such a thing or a price.

I would expect that any announcement of such a device would come at one of Apple's big events, So probably, if I had the guess, I'd say September is when they would announce it. That's typically when they announced all the big iPhone changes. But that's just a guess. They might hold a single event for this particular thing, or they might not hold an event at all, They may just release it. That doesn't seem particularly apple like, but it's a possibility. So once the big deal with this

technology in the first place, why should we care. Well, for one thing, it represents huge leaps forward in the field of artificial intelligence. So in one way, it's a really cool glimpse at the at the the state of the art in AI specifically, and stuff like speech recognition, which is pretty hard stuff. I mean, we all have different ways of pronouncing words, and depending upon your region, you might have an accent that has a different way

of pronouncing word. For example, Uh, you know, the Brits say aluminium and we say aluminum here in the United States. Then even within a single country, you have different ways of pronouncing things. And when Google first began translating speech to text in voice messages, I noticed that it was having a real hard time interpreting the words of some

of my friends and family. Now keep in mind I am in the Southeast United States Georgia, and that is we have a lot of people here with Southern accents. I have a tiny bit of one. My parents have a slightly stronger Southern accent. Some of my extended relatives haven't even stronger Southern accent, and so when they would call and leave a voicemail, Google had to guess at what they were saying, and was not always correct. I would have to go and listen to the voicemail because

the transcription would be completely indecipherable. Now, over time this has improved. The speech recognition software has improved where it can adjust for things like different accents and and the different ways that people speak, using a lot of different algorithms that have been based in machine learning to kind of get a grip on what is being said and even and anticipate what the next thing will be in

in any line of thought. Obviously, for someone like me who stumbles over words occasionally, that's a real challenge because sometimes I don't even know what's next to come out of my mouth. But that's really where where that power comes in. Now, over time, not just speech recognition has improved, we've also had to look at the problem of natural language. Now, natural language is how you and I could communicate with

one another. Unless it's like a really formal setting. We usually are pretty casual with our language, and we can make use of lots of different linguistic flourishes and tools, things like figures of speech, metaphors, similes, puns, references, and lots of other stuff that gives meaning to what we say. But only if the other person also understands what's going on. They also have to have that benefit. Otherwise it just

becomes a jumble of nonsense. I'm reminded of a Star Trek the Next Generation episode where characters only spoke in um allegory, and if you didn't have that cultural background, if you didn't understand the references, you didn't understand where the community, what, what the communication meant um. Similar problem with machines. They don't necessarily know what we're saying all the time. A lot of machines are not very good

at doing this. But natural language familiarity has been a huge challenging in AI, and we're getting better at overcoming that challenge. So at that that same Iowa event where Google announced Google Home, they demonstrated that you could start a conversation with your personal assistant asking something fairly specific, such as, we're gonna go with a local reference for for yours truly, how are the Atlanta Braves doing this season? Then?

The assistant would actually break your heart by telling you how poorly the Braves are doing this season and it is abysmal. And you could follow that up with when do they play at home next? And the assistant would understand that when you say they, you mean the Atlanta Braves, and when you say at home, it would understand you meant Atlanta, Georgia. So it would be able to figure out the context of what you said without you having to restate when do the Atlanta Braves play in Atlanta next?

You could take these little linguistic shortcuts that we would normally do in natural conversation, but typically machines are not great at that. They don't have the capacity to understand how one sentence can follow another. But this is an example of how that's changed through machine learning. So you've gotten this new approach where you can continue a series of questions that build on previous questions and answers, and the Google Assistant can continue to give you relevant information,

which is a pretty powerful statement in AI. Also, you might have heard that funny story that Google fed romance novels to its AI to make it better at understanding natural language, And to be fair, that's just part of the story. Google actually fed lots of different types of unpublished literature to its AI, all with the goal of teaching the AI that there are many different ways to

say the same thing. So here's an example. Um, I could say it's raining pretty hard today, or it's really coming down out there, or it's raining cats and dogs dogs, or it's pouring outside, and all of those mean the same thing. But they're all different ways of saying that it's raining really hard. And there are a lot of other ways I could say the same you know, to

to express the same thought using different words. And that's a challenge for machines because we as humans understand that you can say all these different things and that all means the same thing. But machines have to be taught that. So romance novels, as it turns out, are a good way to teach a an AI how to interpret different

things because romance novels are incredibly formulaic. If you were to break down a romance novel and and you outlined it scene by scene so that you understood where the beats and the story were and who the characters were in their relationships to one another, you would see that a lot of romance novels follow the exact same structure, the exact same plot structure, but because they're written by different people, because the character names in places are often

changed from book to book. I mean, obviously you wouldn't want to write the same novel forty times. It means that you have a lot of different ways to express the same ideas. So if you feed a whole bunch of formulating novels into an AI to teach it humans have lots of different ways to express the same thoughts, that's a pretty powerful tool. Um. And again, it wasn't the only type of story that was being fed to

Google's AI. It's just the one that caught a lot of people's attention because it the headlines right themselves at that point. So one thing that is really, you know, funny about that is a lot of people made jokes about Google AI suggesting different ways to rip a bodice or to make a bosom heave from the whole romance novel thing, But as it turns out, it was there

was some real thought given to using this approach. Now, one of the ways that these assistants work so well is to tap into information about you and to store all of that off of the hardware so that it can anticipate what you want and what you need and

how to fulfill that. So, for example, if I'm using Amazon and I'm using the Echo and I'm I'm using Alexa to purchase certain things off the Amazon Store, this ends up tapping into that algorithm that tells Amazon what I've bought and what I have browsed and and the sort of stuff I'm interested in, so it can suggest new things that I might be interested in but didn't know about. All of that is a very powerful tool.

One of the exceptions here is Apple's SIRIE. So Apple pretty much locks everything down into the hardware as opposed to sharing it with third party or putting it in the cloud. That's because Apple's revenue source selling that hardware and related services like support plans like like a product support or protection plans for your hardware. That's how Apple

makes its money. It's making it through selling this hardware that it is producing, as opposed to something like Google, which until Google Home comes out, it's selling an idea to you and then selling you to advertisers. Uh. So Apple That the benefits Apple in some ways because it means that you can trust Syria a little more than you could some of the other assistants because it's it's

mostly contained to your device. On the flip side, it makes the actual service a little less useful because it cannot tap into the massive resources of the Internet the way some of these other assistants can, because again it's all pretty much contained your device. Now I can access I can pull stuff from the Internet for you, but it's not as interactive as some of these other assistants are.

Uh So, there with the possibility of advertising or things like Google or Amazon rather Amazon's integrated shopping services, you start to see some real potential for revenue generation on the back end. But it also brings up some questions about privacy and security. Now. To look into that matter further, I spoke with an expert on the subject, the founder of a company called Big I d Dmitri Serota, and here's what he had to say. Well, I think that

clearly there's a certain degree of inevitability around this. I think we've moved from an age of having these technologies and you can almost think of this as kind of web dot dot one in terms of being responsive to the user and personalization really being about kind of targeting you. I think we're now shifting to an era of anticipation.

You know, the technologies are becoming smarter and they know more about you because they uch you on so many levels, whether you're on the web, whether you're on your mobile, whether you're at the office, whether you're in the car, whether you're at home, as is the case with with Google Home and Amazon Echo and similar technologies, that they're no longer just about kind of responding to a particular action.

They're now trying to anticipate what you'd want. And in some degree, you know, they're becoming more like your mother or your parents, where they know so much about you that they anticipate your needs um and there's a good and a bad to that, right, So just the actions that we would take in our homes can start to set up these these expectations, for lack of a better word,

that our technology will have about us. For example, the easiest way I think to illustrate this to today's audience is to talk about something like the nest thermostat, where you have said it a certain way, and it starts to learn what your preferences are over time and then it begins to automatically just without you ever having to touch it, to the point where it's even seeing quote unquote seeing when you are home versus not home. This is the sort of stuff that, when incorporated into a

device like Google Home, can become very powerful. But also, like you said, has this this other side to it, this side that that if we don't pay attention to it, it could become potentially um harmful to us, or at least at the at the very least anyway uh inconvenient

to us. So, for example, with our setting up Google Home so that we would be able to control lighting and security systems and uh thermostats, not only would we have it set up so that it's to our preferences, but it actually has learned when we're at home versus when we're not at home, and what that information means could be potentially very harmful to us. So in your mind, where where does accountability lie? Is this something that we ourselves are are at least partly accountable for that kind

of information? Are the companies that create this technology? Are they accountable? It's it's such a cloudy area. Where do you see that? So it's a mix now clearly, and I think I want to kind of emphasize this. You mentioned earlier how this could become inconvenient. The reality is is that we as the consumer want this because we want it because it is convenient. We want technologies that

are passive. We don't necessarily want to click buttons. We want technologies that are intelligent enough to be able to help us make decisions. Right. I mentioned earlier about anticipation, the challenge with convenience, and convenience typically goes against the grain of security and privacy to some degree. If we really want a mother, uh, kind of anticipating our needs, what we want for lunch, where we want to go

for travel, you get. You get. The negative of having your parent with you after you've kind of left for university or or left for the office, is that you don't want them intruding too many places or too much about you. You want to keep certain parts of your life separate. And the reality is is that there's a trade off around here. So you know, I do think

that there's a consumer drive towards this. It's just that we are not necessarily always prepared because there's a bit of a lag or a delay before the consequences of having this convenience are fully made aware are aware to us. So in terms of the responsibility of who cares about this, we as consumers obviously care about it. You know. The companies like Google and Amazon obviously you know, they would argue that by personalizing service to you, they are giving

you this convenience. But the reality is it's really up to their best efforts or what they think is the right combination of privacy and security for now. And the reason for that is the regulators take time to catch up. They don't necessarily know the latest, they didn't attend Google Io, and they don't know necessarily know how to react or respond.

So there's always gonna be this this lag between what the consumers want, what the companies are able to deliver in response to that need, and then what the regulators are able to introduce in terms of a balance in terms of rules and regulations. Uh And in this produal case in around privacy and security, and I would argue that the companies have it in their best interests to handle this as carefully as possible for multiple reasons. One,

like you've just pointed out. If they do not, then that means that you're going to get that that sort of tick talk effect, the tick being that they take a certain approach, the talk being that regulations are following because if there's any mishandling, especially of a of a chaotic scale, then there's going to be a harsh response further down the line, and it doesn't behoove the companies to to uh invite that in alsobviously, if they do not prove to be responsible with that data, that reflects

poorly on them from a consumer standpoint as well, they'll lose customers. So it's not as if there's no incentive on the company's part to be careful, but at the same time they want to be able to leverage that data uh to to make as good use of it

as possible. I've often said on this show that if you look around and you realize that the service you are using doesn't cost you anything, that essentially that means that you yourself are the product and that what you are doing is generating value for another entity out there, for example like Google, where you're using Google Search and then turn is generating value for Google. You yourself are

are the probably being sold to other companies. So it's it's one of those things where it's the balance between the desire to provide this service and to make um, you know, revenue off of of of something beyond just selling a device like the Google Home device, and making certain that you don't alienate your consumer base or invite particularly restrictive regulations. UH. To that end. Of course, in

the United States, it's one story. In other parts of the world, there are different views of privacy and security, some of which go well beyond what is typically seen here in the US. Do you think the device do you think Google Home and things like Amazon's Echo, do you think those are going to have different levels of acceptance in different parts of the world? And where do you think might be a case for this is probably

going to be a big success in one place. We've heard that Amazon Niccho has been a pretty big success so far, versus a market where it may not be. Yeah, Well, you've seen even things like credit card adoption differ from country to country, um, just because there are different kind of cut cultural kind of mores around credit around potential privacy implications, UM in terms of no kind of a

transaction and kind of the origins and so forth. UM. And so you've seen this in Europe in particular, right, So not all countries in Europe are equally predisposed to using credit cards as we are in the US. So yeah, I think there definitely will be different cultural adoption. Um. But you know, at the end of the day, like you you mentioned rightly, a lot of these companies, it's in their interest to do a good job because we we as consumers, only tend to shop from people we trust.

The challenges, of course, is that we will sometimes wonder, just like you are right here in terms of this interview, you know, what are the implications. You know, you could very quickly go from a situation that appears like having your mother around all of you around you too, having a situation we're having big brother around you, uh in kind of sense in the Orwellian sense where something is so aware of every facet about your life, but maybe they just know a little bit too much. Uh. And

so you know, we're kind of entering that phase. Right. We've we've historically had a you places that we weren't necessarily connected to, right and our home with the exception obviously of our PCs and our phones have not been connected. They've been into some degree of thanks groupe, we sit down for dinner. Um, we're not connected to the net.

And I think what this revelation is making people aware of is that, uh, kind of in the future, there'll be very very few places left, um that are not networked, where our activities are not kind of transponding or transmitting

or telegraphing kind of our activities. Uh. And you know, it will take time for people to adjust, and as I mentioned earlier, it will not it won't just be about consumers and kind of buyers, but also you know, the governments will have a say, and as you pointed out, you know, in certain places the governments have already had to say around privacy, like in Europe with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation UM to better protect consumers.

I think we're all going to become a lot more sensitive to the privacy implications of always being online. And I think that we're seeing that as well, just you know, in other areas of technology. Just recently, there was uh, these reports coming out about the FBI's database of biometric data and the concerns people have about that and even interesting questions like do I do I own my own face? Should I shouldn't I have access to data about me?

And this again, you know, we're in a world where our technology is pervasive, and in many ways that is amazing. It is giving us an almost seamless experience of having our desires catered to before we can even give thought to them. That is the big promise of the Internet of things, and I love that idea. It is something

that really appeals to me. On the flip side, you start to realize that you're regular actions are creating data, and that data does in fact have value, different value to different entities out there, and so having these sort of technologies inviting them in. Once you have reconciled this idea and you realize that, uh, that this is going on, then you can start to make those strategies. How is the was the best way of handling that both on the the end user side and on the back end side,

so that it is a responsible approach. That's really what what your company is looking into, right, the idea of security and and helping companies protect uh customer data. Yeah, so that's actually kind of very very kind of similar to this. I think you know, one of the things, um you were kind of touching upon is this kind of expectation of organizations to do a better job of safeguarding your information, essentially being responsible custodians of your data.

The challenge for most companies UM, you know, maybe with with less sophistication than a Google, but maybe even Google, is that they collect so much information about you, and they collected it's so many different places and so many applications.

It doesn't necessarily mean that all that information is tied together, but you are leaving digital footprints across organizations and so these these companies are essentially becoming large data collection points and it's hard for you as a consumer to know exactly what digital footprints you've left. You want to know

what assets you've left with them and believe it or not. UM. You know, if you think about accounting and how companies are expensed, expected to have responsible UM tools in place to track how much revenue comes in, how that money is getting dispersed, who it's paying. So that's all about

accounting and financial responsibility. On the digital side, there's very little of that today and that kind of the origin of Big I D. You could think a big I D as a tool set to help big companies understand where their customer information is what's at risk or potentially at risk, either in terms of breach or in terms of misuse UH and then how to better understand how that information is getting used in the organization, either to

help ensure that it's compliant with regulations or secondly that it's complied with their own kind of privacy rules, their own consent agreements that they've created between themselves and their consumers. And so I think that this idea of a ledger or accounting software for privacy information doesn't as yet exist, and I think increasingly, just given the number of digital touchpoints that we have with the companies we interact with, um that it's going to be certainly a future requirement.

I think that's really interesting, and I'm thankful that there are organizations like yours that are looking into this to try and create those best practic This is because, as we've seen recently, it's scholarship has shown it takes very few data points to be able to link some information to a specific person, and I think a lot of companies out there may not even be aware of the implications of some of the data they're collecting, not through

any sort of of maliciousness. It simply is, as you point out, there's so many of these little digital touch points that you cannot necessarily anticipate what the consequences are from the from the very beginning. And uh, it's amazing to me to think that this is going on everywhere, and and it's it's a it's a snowball that's already going down the hill. It's just going to keep on going.

It's very reassuring to hear that there are people actively thinking about these and trying these issues and trying to find the best ways of handling that kind of information so that we don't have uh any or we can avoid as many chaotic moments of absolute failure as possible. Well, again, I think a lot of people assume that big companies are actively pursuing the collection and selling of all of

the data, and that's not the case. Across the board, there are companies that are collecting a great deal of data in the pursuit of whatever business they do, but it's not through the it's not necessarily with an intent to do anything uh, you know, commercial with that information. But knowing this makes it easier for those companies to be more responsible and uh, and also to maybe even get to a point where they change up their practices so that they're only collecting the points of data that

are relevant to their business. Yeah, well, look, certainly that's the intent of big ideas to help companies be more responsible around their digital assets, the customer assets, which you could argue are probably the most important assets. You know. Sometimes you've heard people talk about employees, and you know your your most important assets are your employees, and they

walk out the door every every night. Well, your customers are pretty valuable too, because if they if they stop patronizing you, your business suffers, and their loyalty increasingly is very thickle. So if they don't have confidence that you are protecting their personal information, they're kind of digital digital

footprints don't go somewhere else. They'll go to somebody that does take better care of that, which again is why it kind of makes sense to have uh technology that gives organizations better, better tooling to track, manage, protect those digital personal assets. About digital information that represents kind of who you are, where you live, where you've been, what

you like when you're going on vacation, et cetera. Now, I've got a question for you personally, which is that, are you at a point where you would adopt a technology such as Amazon Echo or Google Home or would you personally wait a little longer or you know, where do you stand on that? Because I can tell you being aware of these issues, I guess it's only fair that I answered my own question being aware of these

issues and and being cognizant of them. I I'm still leaning towards getting one, knowing what I know, and taking the risk in order to have the benefit. My wife feels very differently about it, so that's why I do not have one. But but I'm curious what, as you, as an expert on this subject matter, how you feel about that. Yeah, so I think there's there's two things

that come into play. Obviously, I'm a fifteen year vetter in the security industry with a company focused on enterprise privacy management now, so I understand some of the consequences and repercussions. But I'm also at heart a person that

likes technology. I as a reader of Isaac Asimov as a kid, Fine Land, all the kind of great science fiction writers, and I realized the future is coming towards us, and we could either try and hide or dock or we could try and embrace it and understand the consequences. So for me personally, UM, I look at this and try to understand how this technology will impact our lives

going forward. So I will be an embracer of the technology because I think, as I said at the very beginning, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of convenience that comes with it, but it's also important for me to understand some of the consequences by going through it firsthand, because at the end of the day, if I'm you know, I'm part of a team building technology to better help protect customer information, then I had need to understand the

implications of these new home automation, car automation technologies. Excellent, Dmitri Saroda, thank you so much, founder and CEO of Big I D. You really helped me and I hope my listeners understand a bit more of the implications of this. I realized that this sort of technology that has this incredible connection to our personal lives, really a level of intimacy that most technology does not have, carries with it some things that can be a little worrisome. But I

agree with you. I think if we enter into it with open eyes and we are aware of the challenges. We're not denying that challenges exist, but we are aware of them. That allows us to actually overcome those challenges and reap the benefits of this really powerful tool. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking

with us. My pleasure. Care. I think it's really important to remember that Mr Sirota actually said we should embrace technology, but do so in a way where we're aware of the consequences and we are doing our best to mitigate any negative fallout from this technology moving forward. We shouldn't deny it, we shouldn't try to stop it, but we should definitely be responsible with the way we develop it and the way that we use it. Potential Really, it

has the capacity to make our lives easier. I mean, imagine being able to handle everything by by just shifting

it over to your personal assistant who lives everywhere. You can access that personal assistant wherever you might be through whatever computer or smartphone or standalone device you happen to have at your disposal at that place, and access all of that those features, everything from entertainment to handling travel and stuff that you want taking care of that you don't necessarily want to attend to yourself, so you can

save that time to do something else. That's a really cool idea, And I love the promise of digital assistance, the idea that we will slowly get towards this future where the technology around us anticipates what we need before we can give voice to it. I love that thought and the idea that that my life just becomes sort of magical as a result, because the technology is shifting things to my whim before I can even voice what that whim is, before I might even be aware there's

a whim. I could be whim less. I'm done saying whim. In future episodes, I'm going to take a closer look at what makes these technologies tick and the potential they have to change the way we interact with the world around us. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for both of those is text stuff H s

W and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and bathos of other topics is how staff works dot com. M.