Bringing context into our conversations with ‘Intelligent’ Digital Assistants

Now, the US multinational technology conglomerate known as Meta (formerly Facebook) are attempting to rectify this situation. In February 2022, Meta showcased a new neural model for digital assistants called Project CAIRaoke, which they claim will be capable of having much better contextual conversations.

Project CAIRaoke combines four of the AI speech models currently used by digital assistants to enable their assistant technology to better understand context and have the ability to recognise different phrases that are used to say the same thing. Meta claims this approach enables a more natural and flowing conversation. They see CAIRaoke as a major component of the ‘Metaverse’ - a next generation internet that is more interactive and immersive through Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies.

Meta’s vision for digital assistants is by no means new. It has long been envisaged that intelligent digital assistants would one day become more capable of maintaining the context of natural language conversation for long periods – enabling their rationales and explanations to be more understandable to humans.