Do Androids Dream of Chocolate Cake? Click - Short Edition

Senators in the United States have confirmed Neil Gorsuch

as a Supreme Court judge, following a year long political

I'll run you a bath and play some relaxing music

You 17,000 Tweets, 16 e-mails, and 105 fake news updates.

Your boss sent an e-mail asking if he can stop

There is a quinoa, sapphire, and ginger scallop bake

I'm setting the oven to come on now and ordered a bottle

of his favourite wine to be delivered at seven.

And order some chocolate double-fudge cake.

Shall I apply for a gym membership for you?

Now, one day we really will have artificially intelligent personal

assistants which we can really talk to and who know us better

than we know ourselves, like Pretend Rory.

Now, we're not there yet, but we are well on the way.

What started in our phones with names like Siri,

Cortana, and, uh, "OK, Google," can now control our homes

And this week, Google's Home is launched in the UK.

Now, it is all well having these intelligent personal assistants

to which we can ask anything into their permanently open ears,

but the more we use them, the more trust we are going to have

OK, Google, is Obama planning a coup?

For example, in his day job, the BBC's tech correspondent,

Rory CJ, recently discovered that you can't always believe

Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup at the end

That fake news story just happened to be the top search result

Well, Dan Simmons has been looking at some of the other unintended

consequences of living with these devices.

As we transition from controlling things through screens

to using our voice, for those providing services things

I'm in the BBC's Blue Room, a space where the broadcaster tests

And with voice-assistance, it's not all going smoothly.

Alexa, when's the next train to Manchester?

Sorry, I didn't understand the question I heard.

If you have to find out when the next train to Manchester

is, right now you have to say, "open the National Rail App,

tell me when the next train to Manchester is," and go

through a number of steps to achieve that.

You have to remember a number steps to find out content

And that disadvantage applies to search results too.

Up until now, websites aimed to be on the first page of results.

With voice assistants, just one answer comes back.

Fine if it's a right-wrong definitive answer, the ones that

The moon is 384,400 kilometres from Earth.

More controversial if you are looking for a product or service.

For anyone else, how did you get to that position?

Only one person can have the first spot.

Everyone else will have to figure out what did they do,

how do they work with Amazons and Googles to make sure

their content and their results are there first.

This is not the end of the world, it is just the end of competition

Oxford University is home to one of the world's most influential

thinkers when it comes to competition.

If we use our assistants to buy stuff, Ariel believes there'll be

consequences, and they won't be unintended ones.

That shift from an on line environment to the digital helper,

You have a helper that is voice-activated, you are one step

further from the ability to look for outside options.

Your ability to check whether the price you received

You tell your helper, "order me one, two, three," and you just assume

that the helper will serve your needs.

The likelihood is that in a two-side market,

the helper is actually serving the platform.

Today, your assumption, our default assumption,

is that the price you receive is the competitive price.

And you're suggesting that it won't be?

A walk down Oxford's Cornmarket Street reveals something

the Professor believes won't be around much longer on line.

Doing something like that will not help them find

So we want to make sure we are focused on what they want.

Amazon told us "There is lots of potential and room

Our job is to innovate on behalf of the customer and then

But perhaps what these home assistants are most useful

for is what they are becoming most known for, and that's controlling

Look, I know we have not seen each other,

and you think I am crazy, but I was just passing by, and...

Oh, wait, have you still got that stupid voice control thing,

But the lights were real, even though the oven and the front

door was faked a little bit by us to just show you what the potential

is of this technology if it cannot recognise your voice.

In actual fact, Amazon tell us the unlock feature for doors is not

available on the Echo, and that may be the biggest

admission there is that there is a lot to be done with security

When computing power was limited, the text adventure that players

head-scratching puzzles and mysteries, all brought to life

by typing instructions into the game.

But the reason that I've taken us on this journey down 32 kilobyte

It's a game that I've been playing on this,

And it's a title that reminds me of those old text adventures

Leading you through the Abbey, Abbess approaches one

Now, you might think playing a game on one of these is like trying

Because the Echo, of course, lacks a screen, or any other way

of interacting with it other than barking commands at it.

But that is exactly how the game I'm about to play works.

The player must solve a murder in a fantasy realm.

The game plays like an interactive version of an audio book -

you get a bit of dialogue, then it waits for a response.

Surprisingly, it commands quite a bit of your attention,

and it's quite a relaxing way to play a game, although that

relaxing mood is shattered when you hear this...

Would you like to talk to the Abbess now?

As the action progresses, it can shatter the illusion

and become increasingly frustration when it does not understand

Which is obviously a bit of a problem for a game you play

When it does work, though, Runescape on Echo is a fun

It also points to the potential these devices have beyond reading

at the weather to you or reciting rubbish jokes.

Runescape is available by the Skill section of the Alexa app.

That is it for this weak. Follow us on line. Thank you for your

interactions with us on Twitter, which included changing the name of

one person, the assistant. So thank you, Rory. Thank you for watching.

We will see you soon.