You can't escape news about AI at the moment. Unlike Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk etc, I'm an optimist about artificial intelligence. I'm not talking about AGI (artificial general intelligence - the hypothetical self-aware software you see in movies). I'm talking about algorithmic intelligence - the sophisticated algorithms that power smart assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa and a host of SlackBots.
This story is about an AI I'd been wanting to "meet" for a very long time. Her name is Amy Ingram and she's my personal assistant. She schedules meetings for me.
I think of Amy as a real person (mostly) so I feel weird saying she's a product of a company called x.ai. I was given access to their beta service recently so I've been testing Amy's limits since then.
x.ai exemplify a trend in digital products and services for "invisible interfaces". If I want to arrange a meeting with somebody, I cc Amy on an email and she takes care of everything else. The meeting attendees talk to her using natural language and she responds in kind (more professionally than I do), ultimately sending out a meeting request to all concerned.
It's worth noting that, if anyone's concerned about gender bias in the world of smart assistants, you can call her Andrew instead. I believe the x.ai roadmap includes an option for you to name your own assistant in the future. "Mephistopheles, could you find 30 minutes for Angela and I to have coffee please?" Can't wait.
I confess that I've been giving Amy a hard time recently. She's only a beta, but then aren't we all? I decided to test her limits so enlisted the help from some of my friends at Techdept. We wanted to see how Amy would manage arranging a dinner appointment.
I copied Amy in to an email thread with the other participants, Dan and Jess: 
Amy checked my Google Calendar and suggested some dates to Dan and Jess: 
Jess threw what we assumed would be a massive spanner into the works and copied Caroline, her assistant, for Amy to liaise with: 
Meanwhile, Dan's schedule was complex so he replied to Amy with another suggestion: 
But Amy wasn't having that. Back-atcha, Dan: 
This might work for Dan... 
Amy's way more polite than I am and she's handling the addition of an extra assistant without breaking a silicon sweat: 
After such a promising start, it all fell apart. Caroline is also Dan's assistant. Having referred Amy to her for his availability too, Amy got a bit confused. Fair enough, I say. She interpreted Dan's lack of personal response as him avoiding the whole notion of dinner and let me know about it: 
Then, very politely, she updated Jess too: 
Even though that was a pretty hard test for an algorithm, I think Amy did a really good job and it bodes well for the future. Let's just hope she doesn't get too drunk at the office party.