Science & Society: Artificial Intelligence

This is part of 'Science & Society', a series of free public talks about science, technology, and the humanities from the Canterbury Branch of the Royal Society

A multimodal digital assistant for a smart food processor
Amit Sarkar, Senior Lecturer, Ara Institute of Canterbury, NZ; John Ascroft, Chief Innovation Officer, Jade Software

As Artificial intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous, it becomes an indispensable part of our work and lives in many ways. One such important area of application is AI-based digital assistants. They are now becoming available in large numbers and a wide range of usage scenarios. The design-science paradigm has its roots in engineering and computer science. It is fundamentally a problem-solving paradigm. The design science paradigm has been used to create a solution for four questions concerning rethinking the user interaction process of home appliances:

- Can we speed up the setting process by telling the appliance what we need and want?
- How can we easily configure the user settings instead of reading manuals and complicated menus?
- How can we find relevant functions quickly?
- How can we interact with the UI manually and via voice command?